Kill them all — let god sort them out

One of Europe’s most brutal episodes of religious persecution happened in the south of France.

It wasn’t exactly ‘France’ back then. The nation we known today is bounded by those ‘natural limits’ Cardinal Richelieu described in the 17th century: the Rhine, the Alps, the Mediterranean, the Pyrenees and the Atlantic.

But in the 12th century, the Massif Central was a greater cultural and political frontier than the rugged mountain chain of the Pyrenees. 

What we think of as southern France belonged to the cultural sphere of Catalonia — a region that had little in common with the Parisian royal court.

The Languedoc was a land apart. Where conformist anger set the tone in the north, the atmosphere of the south was milder and more cultivated. Civil power was weak, and the feudal nobility who controlled their respective territories had little reason to cooperate with the arrogant demands of the church in Rome. 

It must be remembered that this was a world before printing. Full copies of the Bible were rare and alternate versions of scripture, including apocryphal books and heretical ideas, circulated freely.

Anticlericalism was on the rise by the end of the 1100’s and religious mysticism flourished as Crusaders returning from the Holy Land brought back Oriental ideas like Manichean dualism tinged with Islam’s hostility towards images, fatalism and dislike of priests. 

Tolerance may not have been official policy in the Languedoc but it was the practice, and this allowed such ideas to spread.

By the middle of the 12th century Western Europe was scattered with heretical sects. At the council of Rheims (1157), the church expressed deep alarm that these groups might form rival creeds that could eclipse Rome’s authority and threaten its power. 

The Catholic church was especially worried about the Languedoc where those with unorthodox beliefs included members of the merchant class and nobility, sheltered by feudal rulers who tolerated them and sometimes sympathized with them.

Pope Innocent III — how’s that for an Orwellian name? — finally anathematized the region’s Cathars as heretics in 1208 and called a crusade against them.

What did these people believe that was so threatening?

The Catholic church suppressed Cathar writings with such ferocity that we are entirely dependent on refutations written by their persecutors for a summary of their tenets and practices.

It seems they were dualists, an idea with deep Eastern roots (the name ‘Cathar’ comes from the Greek katharos, meaning ‘pure’). Dualism, indeed Catharism, came in many forms but they basically believed that immaterial things like light and the soul were created by God and the material world and everything in it was created by Satan. 

They despised the world of the body, avoided eating milk and meat, disapproved of procreation and forbid the telling of lies. They also rejected the authority of the pope, the eucharist, baptism by water, the cross, the Old Testament and the idea that Christ was the son of god made incarnate in corrupt flesh.

The Cathar faithful were divided into two categories: believers and initiates (called ‘perfects’ as in ‘perfected ones’). The latter underwent the sole Cathar rite, the Consolamentum, a brief ceremony that removed all sin and inducted the initiate into a life of strict asceticism — so strict that many choose to undergo it only near death.

The number of actual Cathars likely wasn’t all that large in terms of the population of the Languedoc. The lack of central organization and the range of dualist beliefs called by the generic name ‘Cathar’ led some to question whether a threat really existed at all.

From my reading, the Albigensian Crusades were triggered by a desire to control ideas — to ensure the version of Christianity endorsed by the pope in Rome would be the only version — and by a relentless greed for territory.

Crusaders signed on in exchange for indulgences to save their immortal souls, but far more were out for loot, and the knight at the top — Simon de Montfort — was out to wrest control of this vast territory from the nobleman who legitimately controlled it: Raymond VI, Count of Toulouse.

Montfort was assisted and endorsed by the ruthless papal legate Arnaud Amalric, who had land-and-power-grab ambitions of his own. One telling incident is enough to give you a sense of his character. During the first major battle of the crusade, the attack on the city of Béziers, Amalric was asked how to separate the Catholic faithful in the town from the heretics. 

The pope’s representative reportedly said, “Kill them all. The Lord will know is own.” They put some 20,000 people to the sword, sparing no one irrespective of age, sex or rank.

The persecution of the Cathars was a sordid tale of massacres, sieges, the sacking of towns and the ruining of lands, and we don’t have time for the details here. If you’d like to known more, I recommend the slim and highly readable book The Albigensian Crusade by Jonathan Sumption. 

Suffice it to say that military defeat was inevitable given the sheer number of crusaders backed by the power of the church and the French king. The fall of Toulouse in 1229 sealed the Cathars’ fate. 

It would take longer to pry the survivors out of the crag-top castles on the edge of the Pyrenees where they took refuge. The fall of Montségur in 1244 marked the end. It would take another 180 years for the holy torturers of the Inquisition to eradicate Catharism as an idea.

You might be wondering why I’m writing about this on a travel blog. I want to tell you about some castle ruins I saw in the south of France. The entire region bristles with broken stone reminders of the Albigensian Crusade. But this blog has already gone on too long. 

I’ll save the castles for the next instalment in this short series on the southwest of France. I hope you find it interesting.