Reviews for Massacre at Montsegur A History of the Albigensian Crusade

The average rating for Massacre at Montsegur A History of the Albigensian Crusade based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-12-08 00:00:00 Rose Campbell What a great history book this was; great pace, exciting, bloody anecdotes mixed in at just the right times. And it covers a lot more ground than the last book I read about this stuff. This is really one of the most interesting little corners of history if you are at all curious about the history of France or of the Christian church. If you haven't ever heard about the Albigensian Crusade (where have you been? living under a rock?), let me give you a rundown. Round about the year 1200, the Pope was feeling pretty good about his ability to send great big crusading armies to do his bidding, usually in the holy land. The crusading armies were fond of crusades, because they got all their sins forgiven and no one could bother them about debts or things while they were off fighting. But they were sick of having to get all the way to Jerusalem. (In fact, the last time, they had given up halfway and sacked Constantinople instead). So the Pope decided to use a crusade to stamp out a particularly feisty sect of heretics called "Cathars", who had built a sort of rival Christian faith in an area of Southern France. Now the Cathar faith had really grown impressively by 1200, they actually outnumbered Catholics in many areas. They had been noticeably around in France for over two hundred years. But having a crusade against them wasn't exactly fair. The Muslims were a little more prepared for this kind of thing. The Cathars were vegetarian pacifists. The higher-ups weren't allowed to kill anything, not even a chicken. So, as you could imagine, this was something of a bloodbath. There were several instances of armored knights hacking small cities of men, women and children into little bits. And once the original crusade kinda wrapped up, the church started an inquisition to hunt down heretics. The author is of the opinion that this is the point where the Catholics kinda sold their souls and started down a bad road that lead to the spanish inquisition and other awful things, and I can see that. What's really interesting about this to me is that this is a real turning point in history. If this crusade had never happened, the cathars could have grown even larger, and they had a lot of the same goals that the protestants ended up having. Maybe the reformation never would have happened. If the northern French knights hadn't basically subjugated this whole area of what is now Southern France, maybe it wouldn't have ended up as France at all. It could have ended up as part of Spain, or as its own country. (it spoke its own language, which by now is close to dead). The other great thing about this book is that it's filled with this kind of dry wit. I actually laughed sometimes, which is odd in a history book about a crusade. I don't know if this is Oldenbourg or the translator, but it keeps the book interesting.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-07-11 00:00:00 Paicu Alexandru 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...