Albigensian Crusade

What we now know as the Crusades began, as I have discussed previously, with efforts in 1095 to conquer the Muslims in the Holy Land (essentially what is now Israel and Syria) and make it a Christian territory.  But the Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem fell to the Turks in 1187, never to be regained.  This did not stop the desire for Crusades, just their likelihood of success.

The crusading movement quickly branched out to be wars against heretics (or even personal enemies in a few cases), rather than only against Muslims.  The first big war against heretics was the Albigensian Crusade, launched in 1209, called that because much of the fighting was near the town of Albi in southern France.

A heresy we now call Catharism had been growing and spreading for some time.  It was actually an alternate version of Christianity, a dualist religion related to Zoroastrianism and to the Manichaean heresy of late antiquity.  It seems to have reached western Europe via Bulgaria, and its adherents were sometimes called Bogomils.  The basic tenet was that the universe was divided equally between forces of light and darkness, locked in eternal conflict (and no, we're not talking here about the Star Wars' Force).  For adherents, the physical universe was the creation of the devil, not of God, and the ultimate goal was to free oneself from all hint of physicality until finally starving to death.

There is a fair amount of dualism in orthodox Christianity, but it has always held that God, not the devil, created the physical world (reread Genesis), and that when we rise again we will rise in the flesh, not as disembodied spirits.

For a long time this growing heresy was considered deplorable but nothing more.  When towns in southern France started having two bishops, one adhering to Roman Christianity and one to Cathar beliefs, Cistercian monks were sent south to preach and to try to talk the locals out of what was considered their mistaken faith.  It didn't work.  Even the count of Toulouse, the most powerful lord of southwestern France, adopted at least some tenets of Catharism.

The pope sent a legate (representative) to try to help coordinate the preaching.  His legate, Pierre de Castelnau, was murdered in 1208, some said at the orders of the count of Toulouse.  No more Mister Niceguy!  Calling the heresy a cancer that must be cut from the body of Christendom before it spreads, the pope declared a Crusade.  The count of Toulouse's efforts to calm everything down were unsuccessful, and he was placed under anathema.  The Crusade, essentially a war of northern France against southern France, began in 1209.

It was a vicious war.  Northern forces were led by Simon de Montfort.  You should still not tell Simon de Montfort jokes in southern France, because these are not considered funny jokes.  When asked how they could tell who was and wasn't a heretic before burning a whole village, he was said to have quipped, "Burn them all.  The Lord will know His own."

Having (sort of) won, the northern armies settled down to hold southern lands.  They took over and enlarged a number of quite stunning castles that the heretics had held.  These are now sometimes called "citadels of vertigo" from being perched on high peaks and cliffs.  The newly established order of Dominican friars continued the efforts to try to convert people they kept hoping were just confused.  The Inquisition got underway, trying to find and deal with hidden heretics.

One of the more remarkable events, a generation after the Crusade, was the Massacre at Montségur in 1244.  A group of heretics, with their families, held out in a castle on a mountaintop for close to a year.  When the castle was finally captured (Swiss rock climbers went up the back of the mountain, so steep as to be thought inaccessible), the attackers gave any heretics who would renounce their faith two weeks to get out, not wanting to kill children and admiring the defenders' resolve.  But at the end of two weeks most were still there.  And, feeling they really had to do so, the attackers burned everybody.  You can now visit Montségur and, after paying a few euros, climb to the top.

My husband, Robert Bouchard, and I co-wrote a fantasy novel, Count Scar, set in a slightly reimagined version of southern France in the aftermath of the Albigensian Crusade.  It is available as an ebook on Amazon and other e-tailers.

© C. Dale Brittain 2018

For more on real medieval heresy, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.

Medieval Heresy

The early church worried a great deal about heresy.  For most of the early Middle Ages no one gave the topic much thought.  But starting in the eleventh and twelfth centuries heresy again became an issue for western Christianity, indeed a burning issue by the thirteenth century (forgive the bad pun).

In its simplest form, heresy is a deviant belief by someone who ought to know better, not just a mistake or a misunderstanding, but something clung to in the face of trying to be talked out of it.  So Christianity and Islam are not "heresies" to each other, because they are actually different religions (even though they believe in the same God).  Heresy was considered dangerous, because the person who rejects the True Faith is certainly going to Hell, and he will take with him anyone he has infected with his false beliefs.

In the early church there were a number of heresies about the relationship between Jesus and God.  Was Jesus just an inspired man?  Or was he God wearing a human disguise but not human at all?  What exactly does the Bible mean when it says that Christ saves?  Can we make our own salvation?  If we need the sacraments (like baptism) to be saved, what happens if the priest who administers the sacraments is a secret sinner?  Most of these questions were never satisfactorily resolved before the rise of Islam in the seventh century, when a predominantly Christian Mediterranean world became predominantly Muslim, and the Christians had other things to worry about than heresy.

The heresies that got western Europe all excited in the twelfth century were different.  They were mostly dualist, that is heresies that preached that the universe was the scene of an eternal struggle between absolute good and absolute evil, that neither would win.  The physical world belonged to the forces of evil in this heresy, and only the spirit was good.

Now it may at first seem odd that this was a heresy, because Christianity has a lot of dualism in it.  But in all orthodox (non-heretical) versions of Christianity, then and now, God is more powerful than the Devil and is going to win eventually, and the material world is God's creation, not the Devil's.  In Christian theology, the human will is the source of sin, not the body itself, which is sort of along for the ride.

Dualism became especially prevalent in southern France, where bishops, castellans, whole cities took it up, saying to anyone who would listen that they had finally figured out Christianity's true message.  Preachers trying to persuade them differently had no effect.  The eventual result in the thirteenth century was a war of northern France against southern France, the "Albigensian Crusade," blessed by the pope, who said that the heresy was a "cancer" that must be "cut out" before it spread further.

Southern France lost the war, and the heretics had to recant or go into hiding.  This was the war in which Simon de Montfort, the leader, famously said, when asked if they should massacre a whole town, "Kill them all.  The Lord will know His own."  It is still not a good idea to tell Simon de Montfort jokes in southern France.

The image above is the castle at Montfort in southern France, named for Simon (the castle has been rebuilt since his day).  The fantasy novel Count Scar that I wrote with my husband is a lightly fictionalized version of southern France in the aftermath of the Albigensian Crusade (available as an ebook at http://amzn.com/B0057CVI9S).

© C. Dale Brittain 2014 
For more on medieval religion, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.