Heresy and Crusade in Southern France: The Cathars

’tis but a scratch: fact and fiction about the Middle Ages – Episode 14

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.

The host of ’tis but a scratch is Richard Abels, a professor emeritus of history at the United States Naval Academy, Richard is a specialist in the military and political institutions of Anglo-Saxon England. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America.

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Intro and exit music are by Alexander Nakarada

Welcome to our podcast is but of 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 alian heresy and the Crusade that Pope inoc thei launched against it please join us this episode

Is the first of a two-part Series in the second we will explain how the failure of the alenzi and crusade to eradicate heresy in southern France led the p Ley to adopt a Roman legal process Inquisition to identify examine and punish Heretics St Dominic’s order of preachers attempted with limited success

To convert the Heretics of Southern France through persuasion and teaching but the Dominicans had greater success in their later role of inquisitors the cliche the pen is mightier than the S strikes me as wishful thinking on the part of intellectuals and high school nerds everywhere but in the case of

Medieval inquisitions it proved true where crusading fell short the bureaucratic technology of written recordkeeping succeeded the heresy that gave birth to the medieval Inquisition is the subject of today’s episode I should begin with a caveat okay let’s get this out of the way over the last 20

Years the term cism has become the topic of heated academic debate just as feudalism has become the F-word among academic medievalists Cath is the seword for some historians of medieval heresy there are two main issues here first whether cathar is the proper term for the religious movement in 12th and 13th

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 Peg of Washington University in St Louis few first monographs that is

Books of detailed scholarship largely addressed only to other Scholars have made as greater Splash as pegs the corruption of Angels the great inquisition of 1245 to 1246 published by the University of Princeton press in the year 2001 the book is a close study of a singular Source manuscript 609 of the

Municipal Library of tulo in France this is a copy of an inquisitory register in which are recorded the depositions of about 5600 men and women from the area of Southern France known as the L Richard and I had worked on this register for an article that we co-authored in 1979 but few other

Historians had exploited this Rich archive to which access at the time was very limited the corruption of angels is historical anthropology as the French historian abanu La lader had done for later cathar in his bestselling mat the promised land of error using the inquisitorial register of jacqu Fier the

Bishop of pamier Peg used the depositions of 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 Pros unlike many academic history books written to inform persuade and impress colleagues

In the field the corruption of angels is a good read I sense a butt coming on yeah your perceptive as always but what makes the corruption of angels truly significant and controversial is its radical underlying thesis pay concluded from his reading of manuscript 609 and other texts 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 read generously Peg’s argument seems to be that the anti-clericalism rampant in 12th and 13th century Europe and especially in southern France took the form of layman embracing lives of aesthetic piety without seeking approval from local Bishop not not unlike the

Contemporary wenia heresy and that the villagers in the aatan recognized their Holiness and called them good men and good women which the inquisitors took to be terms defining them as heretic ministers and again according to Peg vill villagers expressed their respect for these charismatic individuals in a

Ritual of courtesy the M Orum which the inquisitors called adoro or adoration and defined as a heretical religious Ritual from these elements of the local culture Peg argues cian monks and Dominican Friars constructed a boogeyman of an organized hierarchical dualist heretical church that threatened Christendom and necessitated Crusade and

Inquisition the asceticism of these good men and women and the rejection of material pleasures and goods were understood to be the result of a dualist theology that could be traced back to the manans of the early Church in other words what historians term cism was really the product of the fa imagination

Of cian monks and Dominican and Franciscan friars who had overdosed on reading the works of Patric fathers about heresy with an ironic twist there is too much evidence for dualists in 13th century lodu for Peg to ignore Peg’s explanation is that over time the good men and women persecuted by The

Crusade and Inquisition came to embrace the heretical identity foed upon them by their persecutors cism in other words is a fiction created by Dominican inquisitors and Catholic pists that the victims of the persecution came to believe and which modern historians have accepted uncritically you’re the historian how has Peg’s skepticism been

Received by the academic Community Peg has his Advocates and Defenders his treatment of catharism has the advantage of being consonant with Professor R Moore’s influential thesis about the formation of a persecuting society which we’ll talk about in our next episode but most experts in the field remain traditionalist at least that’s by sense

Well for what it’s worth Richard and I are in the traditionalist camp I know Mar Peg and I respect his work but 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 12th and in the 13th

Century this church had a dualist theology that at the very least Drew inspiration and borrowed Doctrine from the Balkan heresy of illism initiates believe that there are two rival gods or as they sometimes call 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 flesh Richard you said that the initiates believed this but that’s not to say that many of the villagers in the lay who told the inquisitors that they

Beli the Catholic clerics to be good men and good women understood and believed in the dualistic theology but then again ignorance of theology was probably equally true of Orthodox Catholic villagers at the time when one witness in manuscript 609 was told by a perfect one of the good men that she was wasting

A perfectly good Candle by burning it as a as a votive for a dead relative she was so shocked she rejected the heresy it seems reasonable to conclude that it was the lifestyle of the cathar ministers that attracted people to them and by 129 when the El jenzen Crusade

Was launched against them many Believers had been born into the sect just as their Orthodox neighbors had been born into Catholicism the term cathar is also problematic the name cathar for a dualist sect first appears in a series of sermons by the German Canon eert of shano in 1167 from Ebert’s description

They shared beliefs with the BAM the Heretics of the Ryland Ebert wrote called themselves cathar a Greek word meaning the ones although egart adds that they had other names in Flanders and France Canon 27 of the third lerin Council in 1179 denounces the quote loathsome heresy of Those whom some call

Cathar others the Pines others the publicani and others by different names that have grown strong in gasy and the regions of Ali and too end quote this is how cathar also appears in the correspondence of Pope Innocent thei although when innocent the thiri declared Crusade into the lands of count

Raymond I 6 of Delo he used the generic term hereti Heretics which is how the inquisit is also referred to them cathar only became the accepted name for the heresy in the mid 19th century when a German historian Charles Schmidt popularized it historians since have followed Schmidt uncritically and often

Unknowingly one of my favorite 19th century historians of medieval heresy the Reverend Sr maitlin called them the albigensians an Al genian has a better pedigree it’s how Crusaders from northern France identify the Heretics they marched against in southern France Alba jenan would simply have meant those

Who lived in the dasis of Albi which the Crusaders identified as a center of the heresy do we know what the cathars and I’m going to continue calling them that for convenience called themselves in the few surviving cathar texts that we have they called themselves good Christians

We could rename Cath cism as the heresy of the good Christians but that sounds a little bit odd so I’m going to continue to use cathar and catharism it’s no worse than saying that William Marshall was King John’s vassel in a feudal relationship for Ellen and me talking

About cism 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 as you know is a lawyer but under her maiden name Ellen Harrison she’s the co-author of my very first academic publication and my

Only medieval publication and that publication is on the cathar heresy and Inquisition its title is the participation of women in lodan catharism and it appeared in the journal medieval studies in 1979 oh God that makes me feel old I mean come on we’re grandparents it’s okay it’s okay yeah

Okay as indicated by its title our article examined the role played by women in catharism in the region of Southern France lying between the Gan and Ron Rivers it was called ladak the land of the language of a because people in that region use a to say yes rather

Than the northern French we the language that was spoken there oxyon is closer to modern-day Catalin than to French today this region is an integral part of France in the year 1200 it wasn’t although count Raymond I 6 was nominally a vassel of King Philip Augustus of

France El why don’t you tell our listeners about the article the article began as my undergraduate senior thesis at Barnard Professor Suzanne bmle was my adviser and she was one of the earliest and most prominent feminist medieval historians at the time it was kind of a given that women played a

Disproportionately large role in a number of medieval heresies including catharism and the question was why in German historiography this was called the fren froga the women’s question and there were two main approaches one is religious the dualistic cathar heresy dismissed the material world as the creation of the devil and the physical

Body was simply an evil container therefore the sex of an individual was irrelevant to one’s ultimate salvation another religious explanation favored by medieval Catholic pesis and by some 19th century historians is that women by Nature are given to a rational enthusiasms that allow them to be misled into

Heresy I know as one of my professors at Barnard responded to a male colleague who critically compared female emotionalism with male objectivity and yes there were male sexist props at barard then so you prefer the rationalism of Percy Beth Shelly to the emotionalism of Jane Austin on the other

Hand there are the brones and innumerable romance novelists you don’t want to go there never mind I’m you know I’m just being yeah I know yeah okay the second approach to answering the fren Fraga is socioeconomic the Marxist version of this was developed by an East German historian Godfrey K kulk argued

That since religion was the dominant mode of expression in the Middle Ages and the church was the greatest power socioeconomic discontents in that era were inevitably expressed in religious terms culk treated Medieval women as a single AG grieved class women were attracted to heresy he asserted because

It gave them an outlet for their grievances against their economic subordination a non-marxist socioeconomic approach was Advanced by Professor Austin P Evans of Columbia University and his graduate students professor John Mundy and Professor Walter Wakefield they examined the cathar and waldenian heresies within their socioeconomic context they emphasize the political conditions of

The region kinship networks and property they however dealt with women only incidentally virtually all of the work on this subject had been based on medieval Catholic treatises against heresy and Professor wle thought a different type of source might shed new light she knew that John Munday at

Columbia had in his office a photocopy and transcript of an inquisitorial register manuscript 609 of the Municipal Library of too Professor Austin P Evans Professor Mundy’s predecessor had been a Pioneer in examining the cathar and waldenian heresies within their socioeconomic context and he had managed to obtain a a photocopy of manuscript

609 the transcript which is what I used had been made by generations of evans’s students in a paleography class I didn’t have much problem with the Latin which was formulaic and pretty straightforward questions were asked and answered in oxyon the gist of these responses were rendered into very 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 witness manuscript 609 is an extraordinary document it’s a record of an inquisition headed by Bernard Co and Jean de St Pierre between 12:45 and 12:46 L it’s

Worth mentioning that the two Dominican inquisitors Bernard D and Jean de sterre were both native to lodon when we wrote the article I assumed that they were Northern Frenchmen I was wrong the two of them set up shop in too and with the aid of the bishop and the count summoned

All males over the age of 14 and all females over the age of 12 to testify before them Village by Village the 254 folios of the register contain the testimonies of about 5600 inhabitants from the lurate an area southeast of Flo that covers about 27 square miles what’s

Really scary is that manuscript 609 contains only two of what was originally 10 books of depositions now the Latin I could handle 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 way Witnesses were

Female and if every woman had been summoned to testify that seems odd not just odd but mystifying the inquisitors Apparently made every effort to question everyone in the region William Arnold Bernard D’s predecessor as Inquisitor at too sent his colleagues to mon to hear the confessions of the pregnant women

And the infirm illness did not seem to excuse women from testifying before Bernard and Jean it’s thus difficult to explain this lower number of female Witnesses in manuscript 609 it just is what it is more significantly I wasn’t finding a significant number of women who were Believers or clergy to justify

Let alone answer a FR and froga now Professor vample was on sabatical and this was before cell phones and I was paralyzed and consulted Richard I was in my first year of graduate 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 she was going to have to find another thesis topic because she couldn’t answer the frown frog on the basis of the inquisitorial register I asked her why and she told me 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 we were crossing Broadway to get something to eat when I told Richard this and he asked me if the evidence

Doesn’t match the hypothesis which one do you discard and the light bulb went on maybe the FR and froga was a non-question or the wrong question I went back and wrote my senior thesis based on a half the register which and changed my thesis and basically concluded that people joined cism in

Family groups just as the Catholics around them did and that there wasn’t any disproportionate appeal to women now I was concerned that Professor wle might not approve wle sabatical replacement was a professor by the name of maery Reeves Reeves was a distinguished historian from Oxford University her specialty was medieval religion in fact

Joe came of V 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 as Ellen said she had done her thesis on the basis of half of the uh register a recommendation to turn it into an

Article shocked the chairman of Barnard’s history Department who had actually apologized to marjerie Reeves for having to read work by an undergraduate he had little faith in the quality of my work or as far as I could tell my classmates to measure up either to Oxford lofty standards or to then

Male dominated Colombia oh you’re always go there let’s yes because I’m always right anyway at least about that but so I took her advice and asked Richard to help I didn’t read French my German was limited and much of the historiography was in those languages and in writing

The thesis I continue to bounce ideas off Richard my contribution to the subsequent article was to read the rest of manuscript 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 words smithing to the point that it became impossible to tell who had written what after reading all the depositions crunching the numbers Ellen and I concluded that women formed at most a percentage of the cathic clergy proportionate to their share of the general population that’s about half and

Were less well represented among the sex lay Believers whole families rather than individuals seem to have participated in the heresy before the alenzi and Crusade catharism by contemporary Catholicism allowed Pious women a single institutional outlet for the 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 at least as we could find even though the Inquisitor

Reer con who had once been a perfect maintained that in case of need the consolamentum could be administered quote even by cathar women end quote 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 fua the lady esand OFA she took a prominent role in a public debate at Pomo in 127 according to a chronicler Gom de pons her presence so Disturbed the sister sh onvoy that he

Told her go to your distaff Madam it is not proper that you should speak at such a gathering the idea that women played a prominent role in cism may have been prompted by example of es Clarmont she was a very great woman she was a very

Noble woman so she was very visible and in this particular case that snarky Comon may have been motivated as much by her Effectiveness as Bishop folk of tulus held her responsible for numerous conversions at pomier that esant is so exceptional in preaching suggests that cathic Society shared the belief that

The role of women was at the distaff in their homes rather than expressing opinions in public culture trumped theology catharism in theory permitted women to perform sacral functions the culture of 12th and 13th century lodu did not as we wrote in the article’s conclusion quote these observations lead

Us to a tentative rejection of the fraen Fraga as applied specifically to ladan catharism close quote translation woohoo yeah of course we wanted to be modest in our conclusion but we were convinced the FR and Fraga was not a question the article turned out better than either of

Us expected we submitted it to the academic Journal medieval studies on the recommendation of Professor Bundy and we received an acceptance letter a few weeks later which is remarkable given how long it usually takes for an article to be accepted we anxiously awaited to hear the response to our challenge to

The fra and Fraga instead we heard the Sounds of Silence the article was ignored for the first few years after its publication it felt like it had been dropped down a black hole and I went on to law school but then the article got noticed by historians working on women

In the Middle Ages and after that by historians of religion it’s my only publication on the subject of heresy and Ellen’s only publication in an academic Journal but among historians of religion and feminist historians if unknown at all it’s as the Ables of abeles and Harrison a promising Duo who apparently

Vanished Into Thin Air some 45 years ago back to cism one of the reasons we accept the traditional view of cism is because of a Trea by the Dominican frier reneer sone and the survival of a handful of actual cathar documents 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 Ria Sone Suma concerning the cathar and the poor men of Lombardy special is that rer had firsthand knowledge of an experience with the cathar heresy from about the

Year 128 to 1235 when he converted to Catholicism became a Dominican rer had been a cathar perfect if any Inquisitor knew what the beliefs and ecclesiastical organization of the heresy were it was rer according to Sone the cathar sect to which he had belonged was divided into churches that were equivalent to

Catholic dasis at the head of each was a bishop the bishop had two helpers the Elder and younger sons who could perform the sacrament of consolamentum if needed when a bishop died the Elder son would succeed him and a new younger son would be selected by the Catholic clergy under

Them were deacons and under them the ordinary clergy those would receive the consolamentum an especially important source is a cathar charter dated 1223 that survives only in a copy in a book published in 1660 this Charter composed by a cathar elderon for his Bishop contains summaries of earlier records

Concerning the cathar church the most important of these is the actor of a cathar council held in 1167 at St Felix caramon in ladu this meeting was a sort of cathar ecumenical council of bishops from ladu and Lombardy presiding over it was a cathar pope Papa nikus from Constantinople the actor confirms what

Rer 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 bulam a Bulgarian heresy the bulam taught that a fallen angel Lucifer created the physical world nikus represented a rival cathar sect that believed in absolute dualism two

Independent and rival principles of Good and Evil light and darkness Nas’s SE one out and was adopted as the doctrine of mainstream catharism in the west a 13th century cathar tretis survived called on the two principles it confirms the Schism in the cathar church related in the charter and it explains in Greater

Detail Theology of mainstream cism absolute dualism and how it differed from its rival the rejected mitigated dualism now both sects agreed that the evil principle created the visible world and both identified the god of the Old Testament with evil and the god of the New Testament or at least the letters of

Paul with a good principle and Humanity came into being when the evil principle raided heaven and imprisoned the captured pure souls in flesh cathol believed in a cycle of reincarnation in which the soul is imprisoned in the body the only cathar was the consolamentum it was the Catholic version of baptism and

Everything else 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 Believers referred to the Catholic clergy as good men and good women Upon A Perfect’s death the soul would rejoin God cathars rejected sex and marriage as in as intrinsically evil because reproduction created new prisons of

Flesh perfects abstained from eating any product of procreation which meant they were vegetarians they live simply dressed in simple tunics preach 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

Pret that’s why they were called The Good Men and good women Catholics rejected Saints relics and prayers for the dead as useless and meaningless since the material world is evil the Incarnation was an oxymoron God never became man Christ neither died on the cross or was resurrected Jesus was only

A soul not inhabiting a mortal body which is a whole different heresy perfects unlike the Catholic clergy did not tithe or require monetary gifts to perform sacraments Believers were not expected to live like the perfects but they were expected to greet and receed them with honor this entailed performing

A ritual that they called theorum and which inquisitors called aratio and which if you’ll recall Peg portrays as a simple um courtesy Southern French courtesy the this ritual involv Believers greeting cathar perect by genuflecting three times saying good Christian I ask the blessings of God and

You the third time they knelt down they added and pray for me to God that he will make me a good Christian and lead me to a happy ending and the 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 now the Believers didn’t tithe or endow cath our houses they were however expected to Lodge and feed the visiting perfects otherwise they LED lives indistinguishable from their Catholic neighbors I mean they still got married they still had children but they

Were prisoners of the flesh until released by The consolamentum Many Believers therefore waited until they were on their deathbeds before they receiv received the consolamentum and as I’ve mentioned the inquisitors were aware of that there’s one famous example of an elderly woman who was dying and obviously a minister of some kind came

To her deathbed and she assumed that he was a perfect unfortunately he was a Catholic priest and as soon as the Catholic priest realized that they were miscommunicating he had her draged out into the street on her bed and burned alive before she could die naturally this idea of waiting until your deathbed

To get the consolamentum really is an echo of the early Christian church because it was 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 and he did baptism would wipe out all these sins and he would die sinless a practice arose among the cathol called the endur in which a dying believer would receive the 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 matter and you can kind of see how until the inquisitors came cathar Believers were not required to have a high level of commitment if you’re born into what seems like an established religion it’s

Just there but when the persecution became a continuing institution people had to make hard choices and I think that after the Inquisition had been there for a while Southern French people who were still cathar Believers probably knew a lot more about catharism than their parents or grandparents had done

Now the extent to which Lombardy and ladok were hot beds of heresy was probably exaggerated by San and Dominican writers and by the papacy the Heretics always represented a minority and probably not that big a minority but in ladok they had influence and power because of the sex appeal to the

Religion’s nobility uh who must have been delighted by a church that neither tithed nor required land 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 kins women who had taken the consolamentum by providing

Them with lodging and food it’s interesting in there that in ladok you didn’t have primogeniture where the first son inherited everything and you had multiple relatives sharing smaller and smaller properties it’s called parage yeah yeah and so it would be kind of hard for a family to split um if both

Religions required tithing the 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’s remarkable is that non-er towns people refused demands by Crusaders to turn over their heretic neighbors risking death and loss of

Property in addition to manuscript 609 we also read the inquisit inquisitorial register of Bernard ghee a generation later it was Bernard G’s book of sentences and one of the stories in it I will never forget a woman had been brought in and interrogated the inquisitors had found her guilty of

Taking in the perfects holding money for them feeding them holding property for them guiding them from one remote hiding place to another and then this sentence goes on to say and despite all that they could do had remained obdurate as a heretic and then it goes on to say and I

Still remember the Latin of this which I’ll spare you but it goes roughly like this but when she was brought out to the place in which she was to die and when she saw the fire which had been prepared for her she asked to return to the bosom of holy

Church yeah Orthodox Catholics of lodu starting at the top with count Raymond I 6 of tus did not see the cathar as a threat either politically or religiously but that was not how Pope Innocent III saw it when he became Pope in 1198 he

Saw a church be set on all sides in the East the threat was not only Islam but the claims of the patriarch of con Constantinople to Primacy at home it was heresy as we talked about in a previous episode some of those heresies were movements of apostolic poverty which

Innocent theii countered by creating an orthodox alternative the franciscans but in the county of tulo the threat was even greater innocent was told that heresy there was widespread and tolerated by count rman v 6 initially the church attempted to counter the cathars by engaging them in public

Debates like the one with esanda that we previously mentioned and you know it’s also interesting that one explanation for St francis’s appeal to Pope Inon III was francis’s Theology of nature summarized in his canical of the creatures in which he Praises all of nature as a creation of God praised be

You my Lord with all your creatures especially sir brother son who is is the day through whom you bring us light and he is lovely shining with great Splendor for he Heralds you most high praised be you my lord through sister moon and stars in heaven you have formed them

Lightsome and precious and fair praised be you my lord through our sister mother earth who sustains us and directs us bringing forth all kinds of fruits and colored flowers and herbs ah so it’s it’s the anti-d Duelist it’s the anti- Duelist nothing is nothing is simple in this deal nothing is simple the

Franciscans may not have been founded specifically to fight against the cathar heresy but the Dominicans were in 1205 or 1206 two Spanish clerics Bishop Diego of Asma 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 aesthetic lifestyle looked holier than that of their Catholic counterparts so Diego and Dominic gave up their horses adopted dress similar to that of the Heretics this was the origin story of the Dominicans and I’m sort of surprised that Diego kind of dropped out of it and

Dominic got all of the credit for it so the Dominicans received formal approval as an order of Friars in 1216 with the mission of combating heresy and spreading the true Faith now innocent III who was obsessed with Crusade and heresy in general was especially Disturbed that the count of tooo Raymond

V 6 was such a slacker in cracking down on heresy in the lands under his authority the pope first placed the County under inct in 127 and excommunicated Raymond in the following year innocent sent an Envoy the San Pierre dasto to meet with k with C gaymond the meeting went really bad

And count Raymond angrily ordered Pierre to leave his County or suffer the consequences the consequences turned out to be fatal as Pierre was murdered by one of Raymond’s Knights raymon proclaimed his innocence and said that the Knight had acted on his own this sounds a lot like Henry II of England

And St Thomas Becket it does it does the difference is that Henry II was allowed to do Penance and there were no Heretics involved innocent III absolved Raymond’s sub objects from their Oaths of loyalty to him and then innocent launched a crusade to eliminate the heresy infecting lodu the alenzi and Crusade

Yeah goad and it lasted off and on for 20 years from 1209 to 1229 now King Philip Augustus of France didn’t show much interest in leading the Crusade but most of the Crusaders came from northern France with a scattering from England in Germany yeah the reason why uh Philip

Was so unenthusiastic was because Philip was facing at that time a coalition of forces against him from King John of England and from Otto IV John’s nephew who was the Holy Roman Emperor he had no intention of leaving his IL def France undefended good idea now the pope had

Granted an Indulgence supporting The Crusade under its terms if Crusaders served for 40 days they would receive remission from s which is really a difficulty for this Crusade because you had Northern French Crusaders coming down serving for exactly 40 days and in the middle of a campaign a middle of a

Siege would say bye-bye well that didn’t Crusaders in ultrair also do the same thing well they did in a sense in a sense but it wasn’t for 40 days okay they just thought okay I have done my job and we have taken like the city of

Antioch I can go home now close enough okay anyway so leadership of the Crusade was initially given to the papal leate the Abid of Sato arod Amal but it was later transferred to an experienced military commander the well-known Simon defor who was a lord from the yield of

France yeah the notorious side of the manord yeah faced with Invasion by an army of perhaps 10,000 soldiers count Raymond I 6 prudently sought reconciliation with the papacy he burnt some Heretics to show his good faith was publicly scourged in fact in a scene that straight out of the Game of Thrones

He was was led through the streets of sanil stripped naked and then came to the cathedral where he was a rough shirt was put on his back and he was scourged like Jesus was scourged well this sounds like kasasa only even more humiliating even more humiliating okay and he then

Did something which was kind of brilliant he joined the Crusade he took the cross against the counts and VI counts of lodu who supported the Heretics his own his subjects his own V okay militarily The Crusade falls into three periods from 1209 to 1215 the Crusaders under the leadership of Simon

Deon for enjoyed success after success culminating the Battle of Moret against a larger Army led by King Peter II of Aragon between 1216 and 1225 count Raymond I 6 who renounced his crusading vow and his son Raymond iith pushed back against the Crusaders and gained much of

Their lost territory yeah in the yeah you think sides in the third and final part 1225 to 1229 King Louis VII of France took personal command of a new Crusade this ended in the submission of count Raymond I 7th in 1229 by that time Louis VII was dead and was succeeded by

His his 15-year-old son Louis VI 9th the future Saint yeah the future Saint Louie the terms of the pece were actually negotiated by Louis the 9th’s mother Queen blanch of Castile Raymond iith agreed not only to fight the cathars but to marry his daughter and air to the

Brother of Louis viith the EB and blow of the Crusade is confusing and complicated both religiously and militarily Raymond I 6 initially joined the Crusade to get his excommunication lifted Simon Deon for was alternately praised and chastised by Pope Innocent III Pope Innocent theii figured The

Crusade had been won in 1215 and he wanted the Crusaders to go join the fifth crusade and attack Egypt the very bigest Battle of The Crusade the Battle of Mett in September 1213 pitted Simon Deon Ford against Peter of Aragon who had won Renown as a champion of the

Catholic Church the year before in the decisive battle of lvas D toosa against the alahad Moors and King Lis VII before he became king of France had led Northern French forces in the alenzi and Crusade and had himself been the target of a crusade when he invaded England at

The behal of the Rebel Barons of Magna Cart of Fame which we talked about in a previous episode what’s certain is that the alenzi and Crusade was notably brutal even compared to the ordinary brutality of medieval warfare the Crusades began with a notorious massacre in the city of beer 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 was supposed to protect Nobles especially Noble women were abandoned When saon de manfor was killed besieging the city of tulo supposedly by

A stone thrown from a catapult operated by women woohoo uh yeah okay sorry a southern French trador responded to the epithet inscribed on Deon for’s tomb which had pronounced him a saint and a modder with these bitter words quote if by killing men and spilling blood and by

Seizing lands by nourishing pride and by praising evil and mocking the good and by massacring ladies and by slaughtering children a man can win over Jesus Christ in this world than the count of monford would wears a crowd and shines in heaven end quote now hadn’t Simon Deon for also

Participated in The Fourth Crusade the one that never made it to the east but was sidetracked first by sieging the Christian city of Zar and and culminated in the Crusaders sacking Constantinople he did he did but they show just how complicated people and things are especially when it comes to religion

Simon De manfor was apparently very devout he refused to participate in the siege of Sarah because as a crusader he wouldn’t attack other Christians he then left the Crusade when it was diverted to Constantinople and he himself went on to acre actually it’s interesting that we have all these massacres in ladok we

Don’t have very many sieges other than say too it turns out that a Hilltop Fortress is only good to protect you against Raiders of other no local nobility and it’s not even going to slow down a professional Army oh well the massacre beier didn’t seem to bother

Simon Deon forfor but it may have bothered some of his fellow Crusaders some Knights reportedly began to have clowns about slaughtering towns people then went to the papal legate arod Al Almer for advice and he reportedly told them kill them God will know his own yeah he was they didn’t have problems

Slaughtering all the town’s people they only had problems slaughtering people who might be good Christians might be Catholics in this might be Catholics in other words yes so we owe the saying to one of the most oddent supporters of the aleni Crusade cerius of heach for cerius

Ono Al’s response wasn’t in the least cynical cerius was a San monkin preacher reporting the words of a cian Abbot as a statement of Christian Zeal in his Dialogue on miracles in the dialogue an older monk warns a novice against heresies that threaten the church Chief

Among them is the alenzi in heresy which he tells the novice had spread so widely that quote if it had not been cut attack by the swords of the faithful it would have corrupted the whole of Christendom end quote when the Crusaders arrived before the walls of heretic infested

Bezier the Heretics within the city quote defiled in an unspeakable manner the book of the Sacred gospel and then cast it from the walls toward 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 end quote and Avenge the BL blasphemy he did through the swords of the Crusaders okay but what about the good Catholics of the city surely not all of them supported the Heretics okay the cerian monk Peter de who was a eyewitness Justified the indiscriminate

Killing the Heretics in be had a coming according to Peter they had said that Mary Magdalene was Christ’s concubine they had killed their lord and they had assaulted their Bishop quote so it was right that these Shameless dogs should be captured and destroyed on the feast

Day of the woman they had so insulted the massacre took place on the feast day of Mary Magdalene by setting themsel up against God and church the so-called innocent Catholics of beer had made a covenant with death okay and that’s just one of the passages from the Old

Testament used by medieval writers to justify zealously killing the enemies of the board Peter and cerius hisan audiences undoubtedly knew that Bishop Reno of Melia had called upon the Catholics of beier before the arrival of the Crusaders either to hand over their heretical neighbors or at least to leave

The city those who remained had no one to blame but themselves still kill them all God will know his own sounds kind of callous and cynical coming from a San in the middle of a massacre of women and children you know I don’t believe it was I was I’m being anachronistic here I

Think you are we have to hear and understand ano amar’s words as a contemporary stion 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 death of the Catholics of beier were were Medieval collat Al damage and those who had died and they were good Catholics would have gone to heaven okay I guess it’s better than say nits make life to justify the

Killing of children during cromwell’s massacre at at druga we’ve talked about it and I know that medieval and early modern warfare was brutal and that this was especially true for civilian populations Who Bore the brunt of it still the alenzi and Crusade seems to have been exceptionally brutal even by

13th century standards but I think it was in a letter to Pope Innis thei written within weeks of the massacre at bezier Anor Almer and his fellow legate Milo reported that quote are men spared no one irrespective of rank sex or age and put to the sword almost 20,000

People it sounds a lot like the letters that were written after the taking of Jerusalem in 1099 you’re right uh this may be an exaggeration but it confirms what all the Contemporary sources report the slaughter was exceptionally ferocious and the Crusaders saw nothing wrong in it in some ways more surprising

Crusading knights from northern France abandoned all the restraints of the ethos of chivalry and their treatment of the Southern French aristocracy including Noble women following the massacre at bezier there was a cycle of atrocities monford ordered that the Defenders of the town of bran be blinded and have their noses cut off apparently

In retaliation for similar treatment of some of his men who had been captured during a previous sieg when the town of lavore was taken his Lord Amry of Montreal a very great nobleman and his sister the perfector guoer 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 noble men and Noble women were executed or prisoned under horrendous condition without hope of Ransom didn’t that happen to the count of qu it did yeah it did beier was the

First city to have had its population massacred and to be reduced to ashes but it wasn’t 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 alenia

Crusade that quote it went beyond the normal conventions of early 13th 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 peg in his narrative history of the Crusade a most holy war and that’s sarcastic The albigensian Crusade and the battle for Christendom go so far as to say quote 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 end quote this is the nature of ideological Warfare whether that ideology is religious or political The alenzi Crusade was what my friend and colleague Professor Steven Millo terms subcultural Warfare ideological Warfare within a shared

Largic culture in such Warfare the enemy is understood as Millo says as an incarnation of evil or more practically as maliciously motivated underminers of order with a soop 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 they look just like us that also may be why the comparisons even as late as 19th century among historians um comparing Heretics to a cancer on the body of the church which has to be excised to save the body

Itself it might also explain the terrible atrocities committed during the breakup of Yugoslavia and in Rwanda on the other hand okay medieval warfare was brutal there’s no doubt about it chivalry protected to a degree the lives of knights nobl men and Noble women is substituted ransom for slavery

Or execution but but there was 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 was 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 head Henry V threaten haer’s Warden this is the latest P we will admit therefore to our best Mercy give

Yourselves or like to men proud of Destruction defy us to our worst for as I am a soldier if I begin the battery once again I will not leave the half achieved half Flur till in her ashes she lie buried therefore you men of halfer take

Pity of your town and of your people whil yet my soldiers are in my command whil yet the cool and temperate wind of Grace all blows the filthy and contagious clouds of he murder spoil and villainy if not why in a moment look to see the Blind and bloody soldier with

Foul hand defiled the locks of your shrill shrieking daughters your father’s taken by the silver beards and the most reverent heads dashed to the walls your naked infants spited upon Pikes whilst the Mad mothers with their HS confused do break the clouds what say you will you yield and this

Avoid or guilty in defense be thus destroyed I’d love to be able to compare Lawrence Olivier’s version of that speech with Kenneth BRX but Lawrence Olivier when he made his Henry the fth which was released in 1944 he couldn’t bring himself to have his English hero make threats that were

Only suitable for Nazis but these are the threats that Shakespeare believed his audience would understand nonetheless it is hard to deny the special savagery of the alenzi and Crusade historians may not agree with cerius of HEC that the C that the cathol represented an existential threat to christiandom but he his his hisan

Audience the papacy and the Crusaders believed that it did 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 that cerius attributed to AO alar were not intended to Mark him as hypocritical or unfeeling

But illustrate his Pious Zeal and Trust in the Justice of God well everyone is the hero of Their Own Story the major historical significance of the ALU jenan Crusade was political because of it southern France became an appanage of the French Royal domain in a sense The

Alian Crusade was a war of Northern aggression uh okay okay the culmination of the military campaign actually occurred after The Crusade was over it was The Siege the S monthlong Siege of the last Refuge of the Heretics in southern France the mountain Fortress of Bona 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 monar and in part because King Louis I 9th Was preparing to go on Crusade and was reluctant to leave behind enemies of God within his realm sort of the same justification for the

Massacre of the of the Ryland right before the first crusade oh God yeah the Royal senal in ladu gathered forces in May of 1243 to besiege Mona the castle was well provisioned and so well cited that it seemed impregnable it’s really impressive it’s on top of a mountain but

It wasn’t impregnable and when the Garrison of the castle was forced to surrender they were granted their lives on the condition that they would surrender and they would hand over all those who were Heretics about about 200 good men and women almost all of the nobles were burned to death by the way

Part of this they were Pro they were granted a truce of almost 2 weeks and in that two we period several members of The Garrison uh received the consolamentum knowing that it would mean their immediate death and these good men and good women they didn’t have to be

Herded onto the P they followed their Bishop Faithfully to their deaths voluntarily and in their minds they were going to their salvation the ruined castle of Mont Seer on the Borderlands between France and Spain is today a tourist attraction and it’s treated as a sort of shrine by overly romantic

Southern French separatists For Whom the cathars were champions of akatan independent it’s also the subject of a really excellent popular history massacre at moner By Zoe oldenberg oldenberg is an unjustly forgotten historical novelist from the the ‘ 50s and 60s and she captured the medieval sensibility better than some academic

Historian one of her historical novels which I can highly recommend is Destiny of fire a sympathetic though not sentimental portrayal of a noble Southern French family who Embrace cism and suffer because of it I enjoy oldenburg’s novels as well she’s one of the few writers of fiction whose characters strike me as authentically

Medieval in other words she doesn’t try make them have the values of our contemporary readers this isn’t Alan Alda in in Period costume if you get my drift it’s it’s not also uh brother catfi yeah the alian Crusade drove the cath heresy underground supporters no longer could greet or Aid the good men

And good women publicly but the Crusade hadn’t eliminated heresy from Southern France it just drove it underground where sword and fire failed the church now tried something new the bureaucracy and Technology of the written word the medieval Inquisition well we have run out of time I hope you’ll join us 2

Weeks hence I hope it’s 2 weeks hence for our next episode where I promise we will finally talk about the Inquisition and don’t say it Ellen yes Richard