Massacre at Montsegur A History of the Albigensian Crusade Book

A motley militia led by warlords professing extreme religious views rampages across land legitimately held by others, murdering, torturing, and dispossessing the inhabitants in the name of a narrow, intolerant version of a religion whose basis is supposedly peace and universal brotherhood. All very familiar. And yet this is not the self-proclaimed 'Islamic State' of the 21st century in Syria and Iraq, but the self-proclaimed Catholic Church of the 13th century in the Languedoc, southern France.

Zoe Oldenbourg's classic 1959 study of the Church's cynical and bloody crusade against the Cathars brings vividly to life this deeply unedifying episode of political machination and institutional religious powerplay. On its original publication such benighted savagery, which saw thousands put to the sword, mutilated, or burnt alive for 'heresy', must have seemed like a distant memory. Indeed, although the official (that is, the Church's) historical records on which her book is based clearly demonstrate how important Catharism must have been in the civilisation of southern France at the time, Oldenbourg admits that there survives very little of the Cathars' own records, or even much knowledge of what it was they believed, such was the thoroughness with which they were exterminated by French baronial forces and their mercenaries, led initially by Simon de Montfort and backed by the Pope.

Catharism appears to have been a firm of Gnostic Christianity, heavily influenced by Manichaean dualism, and at the end of the 12th century a major contender to Catholicism as the principal religion of the Languedoc. It would certainly seem to have been closely bound up, along with the regional language, the Langue d'Oc itself, as a national symbol, and for this reason the local nobility, while not necessarily devotees themselves, were assiduous in protecting their 'heretical' vassals and townsfolk against interference by both the Church and an expansionist French state. Interestingly, it appears that pacifism was a tenet of the Cathars' belief, so it was lucky that their lords were not particularly pious !

Among the several extraordinary players in this sordid, real-life game of thrones, the Counts of Toulouse, Raymonds VI and VII, stand out as cunning, daring, and - the odd massacre aside - almost sympathetic in their swashbuckling and somewhat creative attitude toward swearing allegiance to Catholicism and the King, which both did several times before abjuring their oaths in order to defend their lands against these foreign powers. De Montfort himself gets short shrift from the author, as do most of the Catholic bishops and Papal Legates involved, for their preoccupation with earthly power at the expense of the burned bodies of religious dissenters. Most sinister, however, was St Dominic, whose very rapid canonisation after his death in the middle of these horrible events seems to have been earned mainly by his assiduousness in sending his fellow humans to the stake. The Pope was evidently so impressed he gave his order of preaching friars a new job as an Inquisition...