Heresy and Crusade in Southern France: The Cathars

In this episode Ellen and I talk about a dualist heresy that was widespread in twelfth- and thirteenth-century southern France and northern Italy.  This heresy is generally known as Catharism.  Its central tenet was that there are two gods, a good god who created the spiritual world and an evil god who created the visible world. The soul of man is good, but the flesh in which it is imprisoned is evil.  Pope Innocent III regarded the heresy as a sufficient threat to Christendom to warrant a crusade. This was the so-called Albigensian Crusade that began in 1209 and did not end until 1229.  A Dominican friar writing around 1250 observed that “if the heresy had not been cut back by the swords of the faithful … it would have corrupted the whole of Christendom.”  The Albigensian Crusade was exceptionally brutal even by medieval standards. It began with a massacre that gave birth to the saying, "kill them all. God will know his own." The failure of this crusade to eradicate the heresy was the impetus for the creation of the medieval inquisition.
     This subject is also a stroll down memory lane for Ellen and me, as we reflect upon our collaboration many, many years ago on an article about women's participation in Catharism.  When we wrote that article no one questioned whether there really was a Cathar heresy. That is no longer the case. 
     Please join us as we examine the historiography and history of the Cathars.

Listen on Podurama https://podurama.com

Intro and exit music are by Alexander Nakarada

If you have questions, feel free to contact me at richard.abels54@gmail.com

Transcript

Script:

Richard: Welcome to our podcast, Tis but a scratch: fact and fiction about the Middle Ages. In today’s episode, Ellen and I will be talking about what is traditionally known as the Cathar or Albigensian heresy and the crusade that Pope Innocent III launched against it. Please join us.

Ellen: This episode is the first of a two part series. In the second we will explain how the failure of the Albigensian Crusade to eradicate heresy in southern France led the papacy to adopt a Roman legal process, inquisition, to identify, examine, and punish heretics. Thus was born the medieval inquisition. Saint Dominic’s Order of Preachers attempted, with limited success, to convert the heretics of southern France through persuasion and teaching. The Dominicans were to have greater success in their new role of inquisitors.

Richard: The cliché “the pen is mightier than the sword” strikes me as wishful thinking on the part of intellectuals and high school nerds.  But in the case of medieval inquisitions, it proved true. Where Crusading fell short, the bureaucratic technology of written record-keeping succeeded.

The heresy that gave birth to the medieval inquisition is the subject of today’s episode. I should begin with a caveat. 

Ellen:  Okay, let’s get this out of the way.  

Richard:  Over the last twenty years, the term “Catharism” has become the topic of heated academic debate.  Just as feudalism has become the “f” word among academic medievalists, “Cathar” is the “c” word for some historians of medieval heresy. There are two main issues here. First, whether “Cathar” is the proper term for the religious movement in twelfth and thirteenth century southern France and Lombardy that the papacy condemned as heretical. Second, and more critically, is whether there actually was an organized, dualist heretical church in these regions, as traditionalists maintain. We owe both of these questions to Professor Mark Gregory Pegg of Washington University in St. Louis. Few first monographs

Ellen: That is, books of detailed scholarship largely addressed to others in the field

Richard: Few monographs on medieval history have made as great a splash as Pegg’s The Corruption of Angles: The Great Inquisition of 1245-1246, published by the University of Princeton Press in 2001. The book is a close study of a singular source, Manuscript 609 of the Municipal Library of Toulouse, France. This is a copy of an inquisitorial register in which are recorded the depositions of about 5,600 men and women from the area of southern France known as the Lauragais. 

Ellen: Richard and I worked on this register for an article we co-authored in 1979, but few other historians had exploited this rich source. 

Richard: The Corruption of Angels is historical anthropology. As the French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie had done for later Cathars in his best-selling Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error using the inquisitorial register of Jacques Fournier, the bishop of Pamiers, Pegg used the depositions in Manuscript 609 as a window on the social lives, cultural practices, and religion of the villagers of this region. The book is also distinguished by its vivid prose.  Unlike many academic history books, written to inform, persuade, and impress colleagues in the field, The Corruption of the Angels is a good read.

Ellen: I can sense a “but” coming on

Richard: Perceptive as always. BUT what makes The Corruption of Angels truly significant and controversial is its radical underlying thesis. Pegg concluded from his reading of Manuscript 609 and other texts is that the Cathar heresy never really existed. It was the creation of inquisitors who willfully mistook local religious practices, conceptions of holiness, and informal social connections for an organized heresy. They did this because of their study of the heresies of the early Church. Inquisitors came to the job with preconceptions about what they would find, and found what they believed had to be there, even though it wasn’t.   

Ellen: Pegg’s argument seems to be that the anti-clericalism rampant in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Europe, in southern France took the form of laymen embracing lives of ascetic piety without seeking approval from local bishops. 

Richard: Not unlike the contemporary Waldensian heresy.

Ellen. Occitan villagers recognized their holiness and called them good men and good women. 

Richard: which the Inquisitors took to be terms defining them as heretic ministers. 

Ellen: Villagers expressed their respect for these charismatic individuals in a ritual of courtesy, the melioramentum--which the inquisitors renamed adoratio, adoration, and defined as a heretical religious ritual. 

Richard: From these elements of the local culture, Pegg argues, Cistercian monks and Dominican friars constructed the phantom of an organized, hierarchical, dualist heretical church that threatened Christendom and necessitated crusade and inquisition. The asceticism of these good men and women and their rejection of material pleasures and goods were understood to be the result of a dualist theology that could be traced back to the manicheans of the early Church. 

Ellen: In other words, what historians term Catharism was the product of the fevered imagination of Cistercian monks and Dominican and Franciscan friars who had overdosed on reading about heresy in the works of the Patristic Fathers.

Richard:  With an ironic twist. There is too much evidence for dualists in thirteenth century Languedoc for Pegg to ignore. The inquisitors were largely interested only in what the people they questioned did, not what they believed. Nonetheless, a number of witnesses testified that they heard the good men preaching that the visible world is the creation of the devil. Pegg’s explanation is that over time the good men and women persecuted by crusade and inquisition came to embrace the heretical identity foisted upon them by their persecutors. Catharism, in other words, is a fiction created by Dominican inquisitors and Catholic polemicists that the victims of the persecution came to believe and which modern historians have accepted uncritically. 

Ellen: You’re the historian. How has Pegg’s skepticism been received by the academic community?

Richard: Pegg has his advocates and defenders. His treatment of Catharism has the advantage of being consonant with Professor R.I. Moore’s influential thesis about the formation of a persecuting society, which I’ll talk about in our next episode. But most experts in the field remain traditionalists. Historians such as Peter Biller, John Arnold, and Bernard Hamilton have deconstructed Pegg’s argument point by pont. Pegg’s response has been to double-down, at times in less than collegial language, in a series of articles that restate his position and respond to his critics.

Ellen: For what it’s worth, Richard and I are in the traditionalist camp.

Richard: We remain convinced that an organized dualist religion and church existed alongside the Catholic Church in Lombardy and southern France in the second half of the twelfth and in the thirteenth century. This church had a dualist theology that, at the very least, drew inspiration and borrowed doctrine from the Balkan heresy of Bogomilism. Initiates believed that there are two rival gods or, as they sometimes called them, principles: a good God who created the spiritual world and an evil god who made the visible, physical world. Consequently, all things carnal are evil. Humans are a hybrid. Our souls are pure, but are imprisoned in a corrupting prison of the flesh. 

Ellen: Many of the villagers in the Lauragais who told the inquisitors that they believed the Cathar clerics to be Good Men and Good Women neither understood nor believed in the heresy’s dualistic theology. But ignorance of doctrine was probably equally true of orthodox Catholic villagers of the time. When one witness in Manuscript 609 was told by a perfect that she was wasting a good candle by burning it as a votive for a dead relative, she was shocked and rejected the heresy. It was the holy lifestyle of the Cathar ministers that attracted people to them, and by 1209 when the Albigensian Crusade was launched against them, many believers had been born into the sect, just as their orthodox neighbors had been born into Catholicism.

Richard: The term “Cathar” is also problematic. The name Cathar for a dualist sect first appears in a series of sermons by the German canon Eckbert of Schönau in 1167. From Eckbert’s description they shared beliefs with the Bogomils. The heretics of the Rhineland, Eckbert wrote, call themselves “Cathars,” a Greek word meaning the “the pure ones,” although Eckbert adds that they had other names in Flanders and France. Canon 27 of the Third Lateran Council in 1179, denounces the “loathsome heresy of those whom some call Cathars, others the Patarenes, others the Publicani, and others by different names that had grown strong in Gascony and the regions of Albi and Toulouse.  This is how Cathar also appears in the correspondence of Innocent III, although when Innocent III declared a crusade into the lands of Count Raymond VI of Toulouse, he used the generic term heretici, heretics, which is how the inquisitors also referred to them. Cathar only became the accepted name for the heresy in the mid-nineteenth century when a German historian, Charles Schmidt, popularized it. Historians since have followed Schmidt uncritically and often unknowingly. 

Ellen:  One of my favorite early nineteenth-century historians of medieval heresy, the Reverend S.R. Maitland, called them the Albigensians.

Richard:  Albigensian has a better pedigree. It’s how crusaders from northern France identified the heretics they marched against. In southern France, it would simply have meant those who lived in the diocese of Albi—which the crusaders identified as the center of the heresy. 

Ellen: Do we know what the Cathars—I’m going to continue to call them that for convenience—actually called themselves?

Richard: In the few surviving Cathar texts that we have they call themselves Good Christians. We could rename Catharism as the heresy of the Good Christians, but that sounds a bit odd. I’m going to continue to use the terms Cathar and Catharism because that is how the heresy is designated in medieval history textbooks. It’s no worse or misleading than saying that William Marshal was King John’s vassal in a feudal relationship. 

The subject of Catharism has special meaning for Ellen and me. For us talking about Catharism is a stroll down memory lane. As a historian, I’ve mainly published on Anglo-Saxon England and the culture of war in the Middle Ages. Ellen is a lawyer.  But under her maiden name Ellen Harrison, she is the co-author of my very first publication

Ellen: my only medieval history publication

Richard: and it’s on the Cathar heresy and Inquisition.

Ellen:  It’s title is “The Participation of Women in Languedocian Catharism,” and it appeared in the journal Mediaeval Studies back in 1979. 

Richard: God, that makes me feel old.

Ellen: We are old.  Come on, we’re grandparents.

Richard: As indicated by its title, our article examined the role played by women in Catharism in the region of southern France lying between the Garonne and Rhone rivers. It was called Languedoc, the Land of the Language of Oc,  because people in that region used “oc” to say yes, rather than the northern French “oui.” The language that was spoken there, Occitan [OK SI THAN], is closer to modern day Catalan than to French. Today this region is an integral part of France. In the year 1200 it wasn’t, although Count Raymond VI was nominally a vassal of King Philip Augustus of France.

       El, why don’t you tell our listeners about the article.

Ellen:  The article began as my undergraduate senior thesis at Barnard College. Prof. Suzanne Wemple was my advisor. She was one of the earliest and most prominent feminist medieval historians. At the time, it was a given that women played a disproportionately large role in a number of medieval heresies, including Catharism. The question was why. In German historiography this was called the “Frauenfrage,” the women’s question.  There were two main approaches to this. One is religious. The dualist Cathar heresy dismissed the material world as the creation of the devil, and taught that only the spirit was the creation of God. The physical body was simply an evil container that corrupted the pure spirit held within. Therefore the sex of an individual was irrelevant to one’s ultimate salvation. 

Richard: Another religious explanation, favored by medieval Catholic polemicists and by some 19th century historians is that women by nature are given to irrational enthusiasms, that allow them to be misled into heresy.

Ellen: Yeah, right.  As one of my professors at Barnard responded to a male colleague who compared the emoting of females with the cool objectivity of males—and yes, there were male sexist profs at Barnard back then, “So you prefer Percy Bysshe Shelley to Jane Austen.”

Richard: On the other hand, there are the Brontes and innumerable romance novelists…. 

Ellen: You don’t really want to go there, do you?

Richard: Never mind, I’m just being.

Ellen: Yes, I know….

Richard: The second approach to answering the “Frauenfrage” is socio-economic. The Marxist version of this was developed by an East German historian Gottfried Koch. Koch argued that, since religion was the dominant mode of expression in the Middle Ages and the Church the greatest power, socio-economic discontents in that era were inevitably expressed in religious terms. Koch treated medieval women as a single, aggrieved class. Women were attracted to heresy, he asserted, because it gave them an outlet for their grievances against their economic subordination. A non-Marxist socio-economic approach was advanced by Professor Austin P. Evans of Columbia University and his graduate students Professor John Mundy and Professor Walter Wakefield examined the Cathar and Waldensian heresies within their socio-economic contexts. They emphasized the political conditions of the region, kinship networks, and property. They, however, dealt with women only incidentally.

Ellen: Virtually all the work on this subject had been based on medieval Catholic treatises against heresy. Professor Wemple thought that a different type of source might shine new light on the question. She knew that Professor John Mundy had in his office a photocopy and transcript of an inquisitorial register, Manuscript 609 of the municipal library of Toulouse, which might shed new light on this “Frauenfrage.” Professor Austin P. Evans, Professor Mundy’s predecessor, was a pioneer in examining the Cathar and Waldensian heresies within their socio-economic context.  He was responsible for the acquisition of the photocopy. The transcript, which is what I used, had been made by Evans’ students in a paleography course. I had little problem with the Latin, which was formulaic and straightforward. 

Richard: The inquisitors asked the same questions of each witness. Questions were asked and answered in Occitan. The gist of these responses were rendered into simple Latin. The register is not a verbatim record of the proceedings, but it is internally consistent and probably captures fairly accurately the testimonies of the witnesses.

Ellen: Manuscript 609 is an extraordinary document. It is a record of an inquisition headed by two northern French Dominican, friars Bernard Caux and Jean de St. Pierre, between 1245 and 1246. The two set up shop in Toulouse and with the aid of the bishop and the Count summoned all males over the age of fourteen and females over the age of 12 to testify before them. They did this village by village. 

Richard: The 254 folios of the register contain the testimonies of about 5,600 inhabitants from the Lauragais, an area southeast of Toulouse that covers about 27 square miles. What is scary is that Manuscript 609 contains only two of what was originally ten books of depositions.

Ellen: The Latin was easy, but I was a quarter of the way through the register and the numbers I was coming up with made no sense. Only about a third of the witnesses were female. That shouldn’t have been the case given that the document itself stated that every woman over 14 had been summoned to testify. Worse,  I wasn’t finding a sufficient number of female believers and Cathar clergy to justify, let alone answer, a ”Frauenfrage.”

Prof. Wemple was on sabbatical—and this was before email or cell phones. I was paralyzed -—and told Richard

Richard: I was in my first year of grad school. I had had a course on statistics along with my medieval history classes. Ellen was really upset. I asked her what was wrong, and she said that she was going to have to find another thesis topic because she couldn’t answer the Frauenfrage on the basis of the inquisitorial register. I asked why, and she told she was finding a disproportionately smaller percentage of women than men. Also, the women named as Cathar ministers and believers were not preaching or administering sacraments, but playing a passive role in the heresy similar to that played by Catholic nuns.

Ellen: We were crossing Broadway to get some food when I told Richard this, and he asked me:  “if the evidence doesn’t confirm the hypothesis, which one do you discard?” finally the light bulb went on.  Maybe the “Frauenfrage” was a non-question, or the wrong question.  I went back and wrote my senior thesis based on about half of the register, which is all I could do in the time I had. I was concerned that Professor Wemple might not approve of my findings.

Richard: Wemple’s sabbatical replacement was Marjorie Reeves. Reeves was a distinguished Oxford historian of medieval religion. She not only awarded Ellen’s thesis a solid A, she thought it to be historically important and urged Ellen to work it into an article.

Ellen: Shocking the chairman of Barnard’s history department who, to put it charitably, had little faith in the quality of my work—or my classmates—to measure up to Oxford’s lofty standards.

At any rate, I decided to do just that. I asked Richard to help. I didn’t read French and had little German, and much of the historiography on the subject was in those languages. In writing the thesis, I bounced ideas off Richard.

Richard:  My contribution to the subsequent article was to read the rest of Ms. 609, round out the thesis by placing it into the largely German and French historiography, and to analyze statistically the data. We both spent time entering data into a spreadsheet, and wordsmithing to the point that it became impossible to tell who had written what. 

Ellen:  The statistical analysis was a bone of contention.  My idea of analysis was obtaining percentages by long division. Richard was talking about regression analyses, and I kept thinking, damn it, this is history, not math.  Richard knew what he was doing, but I snarked that he acted as though he’d invented the standard deviation.  I also questioned the usefulness of in-depth statistical analysis, following a early 19th century historian named S.R. Maitland.

Richard:  After reading all the depositions and crunching the numbers, Ellen and I concluded that women formed at most a percentage of the Cathar clergy proportionate to their share of the general population, and were less well represented among the sect’s lay believers. Whole families, rather than individuals, seems to have participated in the heresy. Before the Albigensian crusade, Catharism, like contemporary Catholicism, allowed pious women a single institutional outlet for their religious enthusiasm, living together, either as couples or in larger groups, in private hospices in which they prayed, fasted, received visiting male perfects and listened to their preaching. Although the theology of the sect made no distinction between souls imprisoned in male or female flesh, women perfects rarely preached and, before the crusade, never conferred the consolamentum, even though the inquisitor Ranier Sacconi maintained that in case of need the consolamentum could be administered “even by Cathar women.”  

Ellen: As Richard said, instances of Cathar women preaching or debating publicly are extremely rare and almost always involved upper class women in the pre-Crusade period. The most famous case is that of the elderly widowed sister of Count Raymond-Roger of Foix, the lady Esclamonde de Foix, who took a prominent role in the public debate at Pamiers in 1207. According to the chronicler Guillaume de Puylaurens, her presence so disturbed the Cistercian envoy that he told her, “Go to your distaff, madam. It is not proper that you should speak at such a gathering.”

Richard: He may have been motivated as much by her effectiveness, as Bishop Folques of Toulouse held her responsible for numerous conversions at Pamiers. The “go to your distaff” diss seems to have been a trope. It also appears in the late twelfth-century northern French chanson de geste that we talked about in a previous episode, Raoul of Cambrai. That Esclamonde is so exceptional in preaching suggests that Cathar society shared the belief that the role of women was at the distaff in their homes rather than expressing opinions in public.

When crusade and inquisition shattered the socio-political system that allowed female perfects to live secure, public, and stationary lives in hospices within their native towns, a few adopted the role of wandering preacher. Fewer women became perfects before their deathbeds.  Culture trumped theology. Catharism in theory permitted women to perform sacerdotal functions. The culture of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Languedoc did not.

Ellen: As we wrote in the article’s conclusion, “These  observations lead us to a tentative rejection of the Frauenfrage as applied specifically to Languedocian Catharism.” Translation: Yahoo!!!

Richard: The article turned out better than either of us expected. We submitted it to the academic journal Mediaeval Studies on the recommendation of Professor Mundy, and we received an acceptance letter a few weeks later. We anxiously awaited to hear the response to our challenge to the Frauenfrage. Instead, we heard the sounds of silence. The article was ignored for the first few years after its publication.

Ellen: Richard said that he felt like it had been dropped into a black hole.

Richard. But then it got noticed by historians working on women in the Middle Age, and, after that, by historians of religion. It’s my only publication on the subject of heresy and Ellen’s only pub in an academic journal. But among historians of religion and feminist historians, if I’m known at all, it’s as the Abels of Abels and Harrison, a promising duo who apparently vanished into thin air some 45 years ago.

Ellen:  Back to Catharism. One of the reasons that we accept the traditional view of Catharism is because of a treatise by a Dominican friar Ranier Sacconi and the survival of a handful of Cathar documents. 

Richard: There are a number of treatises on heresy written by Dominican friars for other Dominicans describing the heretical beliefs and practices that they might encounter. What makes Ranier Sacconi’s"Summa concerning the Cathars and the Poor Men of Lombardy special is that Ranier had first-hand knowledge of and experience with the Cathar heresy. From 1218 to 1235 when he converted to Catholicism and became a Dominican, Ranier had been a Cathar perfect. If any inquisitor knew what the beliefs and ecclesiastical organization of the heresy were, it was Ranier.

Ellen:  According to Ranier Sacconi, the Cathar sect to which he had belonged was divided into “churches” that were the equivalent of Catholic dioceses. At the head of each was a bishop. The bishop had two helpers, called the Elder and Younger sons, who could perform the sacrament if needed. When a bishop died, the Elder son would succeed him and a new Younger son would be selected by the Cathar clergy.  Under them were deacons, and under them ordinary clergy, those who had received the consolamentum. 

Richard: An especially important source is a Cathar charter dated 1223 that survives only in copy in a book published in 1660. This charter, composed by a Cathar Elder Son for his bishop, contains summaries of earlier records concerning the Cathar church. The most important of these is the Acta of a Cathar council held in 1167 at Saint-Felix-de-Caraman in Languedoc. This meeting was a sort of Cathar ecumenical council of bishops from Languedoc and Lombardy. Presiding over it was a Cathar “Pope” Nicetas from Constantinople. The Acta confirms what Ranier wrote about the Cathar church’s episcopal structure. It also sheds light on the doctrines of the sect. The earliest Cathars in the West had apparently been Bogomils, a Bulgarian heresy. The Bogomils taught that a fallen angel, Lucifer, created the physical world. Nicetas represented a rival Cathar sect that believed in absolute dualism, two independent and rival principles of good and evil, light and darkness. The latter won out and was adopted as the doctrine of mainstream Catharism in the West. 

Ellen: A thirteenth-century Cathar treatise called “On the Two Principles” confirms the schism in the Cathar church related in the charter and explains in greater detail had mainstream Catharism, absolute dualism, differed from its rival, the rejected mitigated dualism. Both sects agreed that the evil principle created the visible world and both identify the God of the Old Testament with the evil principle and the God of the New Testament (or at least the Pauline letters) with the Good principle. Humanity came into being when the evil principle raided heaven and imprisoned the captured pure souls in flesh. 

Richard: Cathars believed in a cycle of reincarnation in which the soul is imprisoned in the body. The only Cathar sacrament was the consolamentum. It was the Cathar version of baptism. Because matter is evil, it consisted of a laying on of hands rather than immersion in water. Just as baptism cleanses the soul of original sin, the consolamentum freed the soul from its prison of flesh. A believer who received the consolamentum became a “perfect,” a completed one. In ordinary circumstances, a bishop would perform the consolamentum, but when a bishop wasn’t available, any perfect could do it. Upon a Perfect’s death, the soul would rejoin God. 

Ellen: Cathars rejected sex and marriage as intrinsically evil. Reproduction was simply the creation of new prisons of flesh. Perfects abstained from eating any product of procreation, which meant that they were essentially vegetarians. They lived simply, dressed in simple tunics, preached their faith, and performed their sacrament. To Cathar believers and Catholics alike in southern France, they lived lives that resembled those of the apostles in contrast to the opulence of Catholic prelates. That is why they were called the Good Men and Women. 

Richard:  Cathars rejected saints, relics, and prayers for the dead as useless and meaningless. Since the material world is intrinsically evil, the Incarnation was an oxymoron. God never became Man. Christ neither died on the Cross nor resurrected. Perfects, unlike the Catholic clergy, did not tithe or require monetary gifts to perform sacraments.  

Ellen: Believers had it a lot easier. They were expected to greet and receive the Perfects with honor. This entailed performing a ritual that they called the melioramentum and which inquisitors called adoratio.  This ritual involved believers greeting Cathar perfects by genuflecting three times, saying: “Good Christian, I ask the blessings of God and yours.” The third time they knelt down, they added: “And pray for me to God that He will make me a Good Christian and lead to a happy ending.” Perfects responded, “Accept the blessing of God. We will pray for you to God that He will make you a Good Christian and lead to a happy ending.”

Believers did not tithe or endow Cathar houses with land. They were, however, expected to lodge and feed visiting perfects. Otherwise, believers led lives  virtually indistinguishable from their Catholic neighbors. They understood that marriage is evil, but nonetheless married,  This was a social matter and had nothing to do with religion. They recognized that they were prisoners of the flesh until released by the consolamentum. As such, they could have sex, eat meat, and enjoy the comforts of the flesh. Many believers waited until they were on their deathbeds before they received the consolamentum.

Richard   That was also true of baptism in the first centuries of Christianity. The Emperor Constantine, the first Roman emperor to become a Christian, was baptized on his deathbed. He knew that as an emperor he would commit a lot of sins during his lifetime. Baptism would wipe them away and he would die sinless. A practice arose among the Cathars called the endura, in which a dying believer would receive consolamentum and then would starve to death to ensure that he or she did not fall back into sin. It was not how one lived, but how one died that mattered.

Ellen: The extent to which Lombardy and Languedoc were hotbeds of heresy was exaggerated by Cistercian and Dominican writers. They always represented a minority, and probably not that large a minority.  But in Languedoc, their influence and power was greater than their numbers because of the sect’s appeal to the region’s nobility 

Richard: Who must have been delighted by a church that neither tithed nor required landed endowments from them. Family connections meant that even those who did not believe in or support the heretics sometimes showed their respect for kinsmen and kinswomen who had taken the consolamentum by providing them with lodging and food.  

Ellen: This dualist church seems to have existed side by side with the orthodox Catholic church in southern France with remarkably little evidence of local conflict and tension. What is remarkable is that non-heretic townspeople refused demands by crusaders to turn over their heretic neighbors, risking death and loss of property.

       The orthodox Catholics of Languedoc, starting at the top with Count Raymond VI of Toulouse, did not see the Cathars as a threat, either political or religious.

Richard: But that was not how Pope Innocent III saw it. When he became pope in 1198, he saw a Church beset on all sides. In the east, the threat was not only Islam, but the claims of the patriarch of Constantinople to primacy. At home it was heresy. As we discussed in a previous episode, some of those heresies were movements of apostolic poverty, which Innocent countered by creating an orthodox alternative, the Franciscans. But in the county of Toulouse the threat was even greater. Innocent was told that heresy there was widespread and tolerated by Count Raymond VI. Initially, the Church attempted to counter the Cathars by engaging them in public debates.

Ellen: Interestingly, the Waldensian heretics joined forces with the Church in combatting the Cathars. Both saw them as dangerous heretics.

Richard: In 1205 or 1206 two Spanish clerics, Bishop Diego of Osma and Dominic, one of his priests, undertook a preaching mission in southern France against the heretics. They recognized that one of the problems was that the heretics’ simple tunics and ascetic lifestyle looked holier than that of their Catholic counterparts. So Diego and Dominic gave up their horses and adopted dress similar to that of the heretics. This was the origin story of the Dominicans, who received formal approval as an order of friars in 1216 with the mission of combatting heresy and spreading the true faith.

Pope Innocent III, who was obsessed with crusade and heresy, was particularly disturbed that the count of Toulouse, Raymond VI, was lax in cracking down on heresy in the lands under his authority.  The Pope first placed the county under interdict in 1207 and excommunicated Raymond. In the following year Innocent sent an envoy, the Cistercian Pierre de Castelnau, to meet with Count Raymond. The meeting went badly, and Count Raymond ordered Pierre to leave his county or suffer the consequences. The consequences turned out to be fatal, as Pierre was murdered by Raymond’s knights. Raymond proclaimed his innocence—that the knights acted on their own

Ellen: Sounds a lot like King Henry II of England and St. Thomas Becket

Richard: It does. The difference is that Henry II was allowed to do penance and there were no heretics involved. Innocent III absolved Raymond’s subjects from their oaths of loyalty to him, and launched a crusade to eliminate the heresy infecting Languedoc.

Ellen: the Albigensian Crusade. 

Richard: Named for the diocese of Albi, thought to be a hotbed of heresy. The crusade lasted, on and off, for twenty years, from 1209 to 1229. Although King Philip Augustus of France showed no interest on leading this crusade, most of the crusaders came from northern France, with a scattering from England and Germany. By the terms of the papal indulgence, if crusaders served for forty days, they would receive remission from sin. Leadership of the crusade was initially given to the papal legate, the abbot of Citeaux, Arnaud-Amalric but was later transferred to an experienced military commander, Simon de Montfort, lord of Montfort-Amaury in the Ile de France.  

Faced with invasion by an army of perhaps 10,000 soldiers, Count Raymond VI sought reconciliation with the papacy, was publicly scourged, and joined the crusade against the counts and viscounts of Languedoc who supported the heretics. Militarily the crusade falls into three periods. From 1209-1215 the crusaders under the leadership of Simon de Montfort enjoyed success after success, culminating in the Battle of Muret against a larger army led by King Peter II of Aragon. Between 1216-1225, Count Raymond VI, who renounced his crusading vow, and his son, Raymond VII, pushed back against the crusaders and regained much of their lost territory. In the third and final part, 1225-1229, King Louis VIII of France took personal command of a new crusade. This ended in the submission of Count Raymond VII in 1229. The terms of the peace were negotiated by Queen Blanche of Castille in the name of her young son King Louis IX, the future Saint Louis. Raymond VII agreed not only to fight the Cathars but to marry his daughter and heir to the brother of Louis IX. 

Ellen: The ebb and flow of the crusade is confusing and complicated from both a military and religious standpoint. Raymond VI initially joined the crusade to get his excommunication lifted, then opposed it, and was excommunicated again. Simon de Montfort was alternately praised and chastised by Pope Innocent III, who considered the crusade to have been won by 1215 and wanted the crusaders to join the Fifth Crusade against Egypt. The biggest battle of the crusade, the Battle of Muret on September 12, 1213, pitted Simon de Montfort against Peter II of Aragon, who had won renown as a champion of the Church the year before in the decisive Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa against the Almohad Moors. King Louis VIII before he became king had led the northern French forces in the Albigensian Crusade, and had been himself the target of crusade when he invaded England at the behest of the rebel barons of Magna Carta fame. 

       What is certain is that the Albigensian Crusade was notably brutal even compared to the ordinary brutality of medieval warfare.

Richard: The crusade began with a notorious massacre in the city of Béziers and was punctuated with brutality throughout. When towns were taken, those heretics who refused to renounce their faith were rounded up and burnt. The military courtesies of chivalry that were supposed to protect nobles, especially noblewomen, were abandoned. When Simon de Montfort was killed besieging the city of Toulouse, supposedly by a stone thrown from a catapult operated by women,  a southern French troubadour responded to the epithet inscribed on de Montfort’s tomb, which pronounced him a saint and a martyr, with these bitter words: “If by killing men and spilling blood …and by seizing lands and by nourishing pride, and by lauding evil and mocking the good, and by massacring ladies and by slaughtering children, a man can win over Jesus Christ in this world, then the count of Montfort wears a crown and shines in heaven.”

Ellen: Hadn’t Simon de Montfort also participated in the notorious Fourth Crusade, the one that never made it to the East, but was sidetracked, first by the siege of the Christian city of Zara in Croatia to pay the Venetians for their ships, and culminated in the Crusaders taking and sacking Constantinople?

Richard: Yes, but to show how complicated people and things are, especially when it comes to religion, Simon de Montfort, who apparently was very devout, refused to participate in the siege of Zara, because as a crusader he wouldn’t attack other Christians. He then left the crusade when it was further diverted to Constantinople, and went on to Acre,

Ellen: The massacre at Beziers didn’t seem to bother Simon de Montfort, but it did bother a number of his fellow crusaders. Some knights reportedly began to have qualms about slaughtering townspeople who might be good Christians. They went to the papal legate Arnaud-Almaric for advice. He told them, “Kill them. God will know his own.”

Richard:  We owe the saying to one of the most ardent supporters of the Albigensian Crusade, Caesarius of Heisterbach. For Caesarius, Arnaud-Amalric’s response wasn’t in the least cynical. Caesarius was a Cistercian monk and preacher, reporting the words of a Cistercian abbot as a statement of Christian zeal in his “Dialogue on Miracles.” In the Dialogue, an older monk warns a novice about heresies that threaten the Church. Chief among them is the Albigensian heresy, which, he tells the novice, had spread so widely that “if it had not been cut back by the swords of the faithful … it would have corrupted the whole of Christendom.” When the Crusaders arrived before the walls of heretic-infested Béziers, the heretics within the city “defiled in an unspeakable manner the book of the sacred gospel; and then cast it from the wall towards the Christians, and sending arrows after it, cried: ‘There is your law, miserable wretches!’ But Christ, the author of the gospel, did not suffer such an insult to be hurled at Him unavenged.” And avenge the blasphemy He did through the swords of the Crusaders.  

Ellen: Okay, but what about the good Christians of the city? Surely, not all of them supported heretics.

Richard: The  Cistercian monk Peter of [LE VOO DE CERNAY] les Vaux-de-Cernay who was an eyewitness, justified the indiscriminate killing. The heretics in Beziers had it coming. They had said that Mary Magdalene was Christ’s concubine, they had killed their lord and assaulted their bishop, “so it was right that these shameless dogs should be captured and destroyed on the feast day of the woman they had so insulted.” By standing by and allowing these blasphemies, the so-called innocent Catholics of Beziers had, in his words, set themselves up against God and the Church by allowing the blasphemy. In doing so,  they had “made a covenant with death.” [Isaiah 28:15].

Ellen: Just one of the passages from the Old Testament used by medieval writers to justify zealously killing the enemies of the Lord.  

Richard: Peter’s and Caesarius’ Cistercian audience undoubtedly knew that Bishop Renaud of Montpellier had called upon the Catholics of Béziers either to hand over their heretical neighbors or at least to leave the city. Those who remained had no one to blame but themselves.

Ellen: Still, “Kill them. God will know his own,” sounds both callous and cynical coming from a Cistercian abbot in the midst of a massacre of women and children.

Richard: I don’t believe that it was. We need to hear and understand Arnaud-Amalric’s words as a contemporary Cistercian would have. Physical death is nothing to be feared or mourned by a good Christian. The phrase “God will know his own” is a paraphrase of Timothy 2:19.  The soldiers of God would be forgiven for killing innocents in their zeal to serve the Lord. The deaths of the Catholics of Beziers were medieval collateral damage.

Ellen: I guess that is better than “nits make lice” supposedly said to justify the killing of children during Cromwell’s massacre of the Irish Catholics of Drogheda. We’ve talked about it and I know that medieval and early modern warfare was brutal, and that was especially true for civilian populations who bore the brunt of it. 

The Albigensian Crusade seems to have exceptionally brutal, even by thirteenth-century standards. 

Richard:  It was. In a letter to Pope Innocent III written within weeks of the massacre at Beziers, Arnaud-Amalric and his fellow legate Milo reported that “our men spared no one, irrespective of rank, sex or age, and put to the sword almost 20,000 people.” This may be an exaggeration, but it confirms what all the contemporary sources report: the slaughter was exceptionally ferocious even by thirteenth-century standards and the crusaders saw nothing wrong it. In some ways more surprising,  crusading knights from northern France abandoned all the restraints of the ethos of chivalry in their treatment of the southern French aristocracy, including noblewomen. Following the massacre at Beziers, there was a cycle of atrocities. Montfort ordered that the defenders of the town of Brain be blinded and have their noses cut off, apparently in retaliation for similar treatment of some of his men captured during a previous siege. When Lavaur was taken, its lord Aimery of Montreal and his sister, the perfecta Girauda, were summarily executed, the former for being a foul traitor and the latter for being a heretic of the worst sort. Captured crusaders were dragged by horses through the streets of the towns they besieged. Noblemen and noblewomen were executed or imprisoned under horrendous conditions without hope of ransom. Beziers was the first city to have had its population massacred and be reduced to ashes, but not the last. And this doesn’t even take into account the standard operating procedure of the crusaders to round up those who refused to recant heresy and consign them to the flames.

Historian Malcolm Barber said of the Albigensian Crusade that it “went far beyond the normal conventions of early thirteenth-century warfare, in the scale of the slaughter, in the execution of high-status opponents, male and female, in the mutilation of prisoners, in the humiliation and shaming of the defeated, and in the quite overt use of terror as a method of achieving one's goals.” Mark Pegg in his narrative history of the crusade, A Most Holy War, The Albigensian Crusade and the Battle for Christendom goes so far as to say, “The Albigensian Crusade ushered genocide into the West by linking divine salvation to mass murder, by making slaughter as loving an act as His sacrifice on the cross.”

This is the nature of ideological warfare, whether that ideology is religious or political. The Albigensian Crusade was what my friend and colleague Professor Stephen Morillo terms “subcultural warfare,” ideological warfare within a shared larger culture. In such warfare the enemy is understood “as an incarnation of evil, or, more practically, as maliciously motivated underminers of order, whether socio-political, cosmic, or both.” The enemy is constructed as “devils or fallen humans in league with devils” who have willfully rejected Truth. What makes them all the more dangerous and frightening is that they look like us.

On the other hand, medieval warfare was brutal. Chivalry protected to a degree the lives of knights, noblemen, and noblewomen. It substituted ransom for slavery or execution. But there were no such restraints when it came to foot soldiers or non-combatants, especially when a besieged city was taken by storm. In those cases, the “dogs of war” were unleashed, and soldiers were free to pillage, rape, and kill until their greed and anger were satiated. The threat of such treatment was a strong incentive in medieval warfare for garrisons, whose lords had failed to raise a relief force, to surrender. This was equally true in the year 1600 when Shakespeare had his hero Henry V threaten Harfleur’s warden that if he has to take the city by storm, he will witness “the blind and bloody soldier with foul hand” defiling townsmen’s “shrill-shrieking daughters,” dashing out the brains of their most reverend fathers, and spitting upon pikes their naked infants. In the play, the warden responds by surrendering. Nonetheless, it is hard to deny the special savagery of the Albigensian Crusade.

Historians may not agree with Caesarius of Heisterbach that the Cathars represented an existential threat to Christendom, but he, his Cistercian audience, the papacy, and the crusaders believed it to be so. The threat not only justified but necessitated the extermination of the heretics. We can be equally certain that, whether he actually said them or not, the words Caesarius attributed to Arnaud-Amalric were not intended to mark him as hypocritical or unfeeling, but to illustrate his pious zeal and trust in the justice of God.  

Ellen: Well, everyone is the hero of their own story. The major historical significance of the Albigensian Crusade was political rather than religious. Because of it, southern France became an appanage of the French royal domain. 

Richard: In a sense the Albigensian Crusade was a war of Northern Aggression. The final echo if not act of the military war against the heretics was the seven month long siege of the last refuge of the heretics in France, the mountain fortress of Montsegur, from the spring of 1243 through the winter of 1244. The decision to take the castle was in part the result of the murder in 1242 of two inquisitors by a troop of the faithful from Montsegur, and in part because King Louis IX was preparing to go on crusade and was reluctant to leave behind enemies of God within his realm. The royal seneschal in Languedoc gathered forces in May of 1243 to besiege Montsegur. The castle was well provisioned and so well-sited that it seemed impregnable. It wasn’t, and when the garrison of the castle surrendered it in return for their lives being spared, about two hundred Good Men and Good Women, almost all of them nobles, were burnt to death. They didn’t need to be herded onto the pyre but followed their bishop faithfully to their deaths and, in their minds, to their salvation.

Ellen: The ruined castle of Montsegur is today a tourist attraction and is treated as a sort of shrine by overly romantic southern French separatists for whom the Cathars were champions of Occitan independence. It is also the subject of an excellent popular history, Zoe Oldenbourg’s Massacre at Montsegur.  

Oldenbourg is an unjustly forgotten historical novelist from the 1950s and 1960s. She captured the medieval sensibility better than some academic historians. One of her historical novels is Destiny of Fire, a sympathetic though not sentimental portrayal of a noble southern French family who embrace Catharism and suffer because of it.

Richard: I enjoy Oldenbourg’s novels as well. She is one of the few writers of fiction whose characters strike me as authentically medieval. 

Well, we have run out of time. 

Ellen: You mean run over time. Better wrap up.

Richard The Albigensian Crusade drove the Cathar heresy underground. Supporters no longer could greet or aid the Good Men and Women publicly.  But the Crusade hadn’t eliminated heresy from southern France. Where sword and fire failed, the Church now tried bureaucracy and the technology of the written word: the medieval inquisition.

Well we have run out of time. I hope you will join us two weeks hence for our next episode where—I promise—we will finally talk about the inquisition. Don’t say it, Ellen! 

Thank you for listening.