Persecution of Heretics: Albigensians
Abstract
The Albigensian Crusade
The Albigensians take their name from Albiga (Albi), a town in one of those southern provinces of France which were to that country what southern California is to the United States. Albi has a suburb on the right bank of the river Tarn called La Madeleine. The cathedral of Sainte Cecile, a fine fortress-church in the Gothic style, begun in 1277, finished in 1512, rises high above the rest of the town. Albi was, in the Gallo-Roman period, capital of the Albigenses, and later of the viscounty of Albigeois, which was a fief of the Counts of Toulouse. After the Albigensian crusade, the counts lost their estates, which passed to Simon de Montfort and then to the crown of France. In 1264, the temporal power in the city was granted to the bishops. The archbishopric dates from 1678.
In these southern provinces, the brilliant example of the Spanish Moors was known best, and during the eleventh century the heresy of the Bogomiles was imported into them by missionaries from Bulgaria or Bosnia or even from Spain. The orthodox Catholics of France called them “bougres”, for Bulgars, implied that their sexually chaste leaders indulged in anal sex, and so the name of innocent people became one of the worst swear words used. They were reproached with having a pope in Bulgaria.
The Cathari said that the Church was corrupt from the time of Constantine’s donation to pope Sylvester. People knew this only too well, and, in the Albigeois district, most of the population went over to the new Cathar religion. William IX, Duke of Aquitaine, offered the Cathars protection and the other nobility of the south of France followed suit. Chivalry and the poetry of the troubadours were assiduously cultivated by the Cathar nobles. Even in the cities, proud of their wealth, enriched through their trade with the orient or by their industry especially in new skills like papermaking, citizens boasted a degree of education and enlightenment unknown elsewhere. They were taught to read, and that would not do!
In no other land did the Jew, despised in Christian Europe, enjoy such freedom. They were accepted in public office, and were accepted as successful in it. The Hebrew School of Narbonne was renowned, and Jewish culture flourished here as it had under the Caliphate of Cordoba.
The movement spread in comparative safety. The first Cathars called heretics were noted in Limousin about 1012. Several were discovered and put to death at Toulouse in 1022, and Bogomils were burnt in Cologne in 1142. Even before the Cathar meeting at Saint Félix de Caraman, four Church Councils in 1119, 1139, 1148 and 1163 had declared the Cathars to be heretics who should be punished. The Church hierarchy had become very touchy in the twelfth century. The synod of Charroux (in Vienne) in 1028, and that of Toulouse in 1056, also condemned the growing sect. The Council of Toulouse in 1119 and then the Lateran Council of 1139 urged the secular powers to proceed violently against heresy—they would not, to any extent. Even so, Cathars were burned or imprisoned in many places, but, William IX of Aquitaine continued to protect them, and soon so did many of the princes and nobles of the Midi. They were proud of their industry and integrity in a corrupt world. The French bishops at the Council of Tours (1163) discussed the presence of Cathars in Cologne, Bonn and Liege. They called them Manichaeans[†]Manichaeans Professor Moghdam tells us that, according to the Bayan al-Adyan, “the Manicheans say that Jesus called men to Zoroaster”, “Manichaean” here plainly not meaning a Manichaean literally, but those called Manichaeans by the Christians.
In Europe, the Albigenses and Bogomils were habitually called Manicheans by the Christians. Moghdam allows that the Manichaeans had an influence in Europe in the early days of Christianity, including on prominent saints like Augustine, who was one, but he thinks the heretics were more likely to have been followers of Mithras. The name Bogomil is composed of “bog”, “baga”, a title first of Varuna, but in Persia of Mithras, meaning simply God, and “mil”, another title of Mithras, “the Friend”. Bogomil is usually rendered as a “friend of God”., effectively a taunt, for they knew they were not and the Cathars thought of themselves as the Good Christians, but their decisions against the heretics again had little effect. Then the preachers, Raoul Ardent, in 1101, and Robert of Arbrissel, in 1114, were sent to combat the heresy.
People liked the bons hommes, whose asceticism impressed them, and the anti-sacerdotal preaching of Peter of Bruys and Henry of Lausanne in Perigord, Languedoc and Provence promoted Catharism in those regions. In 1147, pope Eugenius III sent the legate Alheric of Ostia, and S Bernard of Clairvaux, the most famous preacher of the time, to the region. The churches were deserted and S Bernard was unable to make any impression. The heresy spread over France, Belgium, western Germany, Spain and northern Italy. The Papacy was alarmed! These Cathari numbered at least hundreds of thousands in France alone. Pope after pope urged the secular powers to persecute them.
At Lombers in 1165 AD, Catholic priests engaged in discussion with Catharist doctors. A few years later in 1167 AD, a Catharist synod, in which heretics from Languedoc, Bulgaria and Italy took part, was held undisturbed at Saint Félix de Caraman, near Toulouse. The apparent head of the Cathars of the world consecrated four or five new bishops, and gave the religion a splendid public triumph. Each bishop had a Filius Major and a Filius Minor as presbyters, and a deacon. The simple honesty of the Bonhommes impressed the people and they remained happy not to be obliged by the authority of Rome other than in name.
Alexander III, in the Third Lateran Council of 1179, repeated the cry for the use of force and held out tempting baits to those who murdered heretics. To princes he gave the right to imprison offenders and, appealing to their greed, to confiscate their property. To all who would “take up arms” against them, he promised two years’ remission of penance and even greater privileges. Henry, cardinal-bishop of Albano, in 1180-1181, attempted an armed expedition against the stronghold of heretics at Lavaur and against Raymond Roger, viscount of Beziers, their acknowledged protector, taking Lavaur and forcing the submission of Raymond Roger.
Pope Lucius II in 1184 made a new departure. He laid down the penalties of heresy as exile, confiscation, and infamy or loss of civil rights. He threatened unwilling secular rulers with excommunication and interdict, and enacted that, whereas under current law a bishop was to try a heretic in open court when a man was charged, the bishop must now actively seek heretics. They had to institute a search, in Latin, an “inquisitio”. Still, few secular rulers did more than shrug their shoulders. Heresy did not concern them.
This was the situation when, in 1198, Innocent III donned the Papal tiara. Profoundly religious popes such as Gregory I, Gregory VII, and Innocent III did Western civilization the most deadly injury. Innocent III came with an arsenal of anathemas. When a prince grinned at a hurled anathema, Innocent set armies in motion and drenched the man’s kingdom with blood as Gregory VII had done. The bloody genocide which followed has no parallel in history. It was done in the name of the Christian God.
Innocent III resolved to suppress the Albigenses, and in 1198 and 1199 sent into the affected regions two Cistercian monks, Regnier and Guy, and in 1203 two monks of Fontfroide, Peter of Castelnau and Raoul, with whom, in 1204, he even associated the Cistercian abbot, Arnaud. For nine years, Innocent III had monks preaching in the heretical provinces of Languedoc urging the bishops and princes to persecute, but they were quite ineffective. Even the local bishops rejected the extraordinary authority the pope had conferred upon these monks, and, in 1204, he suspended the authority of the bishops. His chief legate, Pierre de Castelnau, received instructions in 1207 to arrange a warlike campaign of the princes, and he excommunicated Raymond VI, count of Toulouse, as an abetter of heresy.
In the bad atmosphere created, the legate Peter of Castelnau was murdered (1209). Innocent angrily proclaimed that Raymond, Count of Toulouse, was responsible. The accusation was unlikely, and, in later life, Innocent admitted there was no evidence. Perhaps it was a Catholic provocation, because it became the excuse for the pope to order the Cistercians to preach the crusade against the Albigenses. The “great” pope rang out a call to arms, and sorely threatened with excommunications, interdicts and anathemas the Christian princes and knights who did not obey it. There was no need of threats. In the thirteenth century, war meant unlimited loot, and the Albigensian towns were amongst the most prosperous in Europe. The nobility of northern France saw the chance to plunder the wealthy region of the south and supported the crusade. The Church set France into civil war for twenty years.
The crusade ensured that Albigensian lands were handed over to French Catholic barons. A rough parallel is the president of the United States allowing Mafia gangsters—Christian knights in those days had no higher ethic—to take every pimp and drug baron to invade and sack Singapore, Sydney and Tokyo. A contemporary poet said that twenty thousand knights and two hundred thousand footmen converged upon the Albigensians. They were led by the Arnold, the Cistercian Abbot of Citeaux—as bloody a priest as Torquemada—and a seedy Anglo-French adventurer, Simon de Montfort, whose purse was empty. The King of France was not in it—at first, only because his terms to the pope were exorbitant.
The robber barons that constituted the crusade massed for the campaign on 24 June 1209, at the feast of S John the Baptist, patron saint of Lyons. Was this significant in terms of Cathar belief? Caesarius of Heisterbach records in Dialogus Miraculorum that, when, at the first large town, Béziers, soldiers asked the Papal legate in charge of the crusade how they could distinguish between heretics and orthodox, the Abbot of Citeaux famously answered:
Show mercy neither to order, nor to age, nor to sex… Cathar or Catholic, kill them all… God will know his own (…caedite eos… novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius).
Arnold himself reported to the pope they had indeed spared neither rank, age nor sex and had massacred 20,000 people. Some have put the figure at 40,000. 6000 were said to have sheltered in the Catholic Church of S Madeleine, and were probably therefore mainly Catholics. It was burned and all were murdered. As each town was taken, the inhabitants were put to the sword without distinction of age or sex. Clergymen in the army distinguished themselves by their ferocity. Simon de Montfort diligently incinerated the heretics, 140 at Minerve, 300 at Lavour, 60 at Le Cassés. A troubadour wrote of Simon de Montfort. He ought to “wear a crown and be resplendent in the heavens”, if, “by abolishing honour, by making pride victorious, by stimulating evil and extinguishing good, if by killing women and slaughtering infants, one can in this world achieve salvation in Christ”.
Raymond VI offered a peace in 1211, so Innocent stopped the crusade after two years of almost unparalleled butchery, but then yielded to the greed of de Monfort and the crusaders and the fanaticism of the monks and reopened it, prolonging the massacres for another 18 years. The Albigensians were still so strong after two years of the most brutal carnage that, when the pope renewed the crusade in 1214, a fresh hundred thousand “pilgrims” had to be summoned. It proves the scale of the heresy.
Today Christian writers dispute these things, but they are recorded in the bragging words of the Catholics of the time. Innocent boasted that they took five hundred towns and castles from the heretics, and they butchered every man, woman and child in each town when they took it. Noble ladies with their daughters were thrown down wells, and large stones flung upon them. Cathar knights were hanged in batches of eighty. How could Catholic knights, footsoldiers and monks commit such atrocities, so fearful, as they were, of eternal retribution in the fires of hell? Because Innocent III had granted them absolution in advance as an incentive to do their worst. And they did!
The accounts of the cruelties and abominations of this crusade are far more terrible to read than any account of Christian martyrdom by the Pagans, and they have the added horror of being indisputably true.H G Wells, Crux Ansata
The Cathars had defied the Church’s authority, rejected its teaching, and in general thought and acted for themselves. For these sins there was no mercy. The custodians of Christianity unhesitatingly burnt their fellow men persuaded that being burnt to death in a half hour of torment was better than the eternal torment of hell fire. This monstrous belief is still alive among Christians.
Raymond was succeeded by his son, Raymond VII, whose mother was a Plantagenet. The war reached an impasse when Avignon and Marseolles gave support to Raymond, but the pope sought help from the French king, Louis VIII, and Raymond was forced to surrender. This sordid war, which threw the whole of the nobility of the north of France against that of the south, and destroyed the brilliant Provençal civilization, ended in the Treaty of Paris, signed on 12 April, 1229, by which the king of France dispossessed the house of Toulouse of the greater part of its fiefs, and that of Beziers of the whole of its fiefs. Raymond was told to spy on his own subjects. The independence of the southern nobility of France was destroyed.
Yet, Albigensianism was not extinguished, in spite of the wholesale massacres during the war. Parfaits faidits (proscribed) were hiding in the forests, obliged to move every few weeks from ditch to charcoal burner's hut, to cellar, to hayrick. Raymond VII of Toulouse and the Count of Foix gave asylum to them, and the people were averse from handing over the bons hommes. It was the Inquisition that destroyed the heresy. Those accused were offered “penance” which meant a lifetime in leg irons in a rat-infested, damp and dank dungeon. Attractive women were kept as sex slaves by the gaolers. Hundreds were imprisoned each year as the inquisitors went from village to village. Those who refused penance were burnt. The Catholic authorities not only destroyed people, they destroyed all the Cathar documents they could find, even forcing the dukes to burn their own records. That is why the Cathars still seem so mysterious to us. We know them mainly from the calumnies of their Catholic destroyers.
The pope’s behaviour during these horrible years was revolting and is known in full from his letters. Raymond of Toulouse, to spare his people, submitted before the crusade began, although the pope expressly told his legates to “deceive him and pass to the extirpation of the other heretics”. His brutal treatment of Raymond, without any trial, earned the censure even of the king of France. The pope was said to have been sickened by the slaughter and the vile passions of his servants, but more important to him was that he made vast material profit for the Papacy out of the monumental crime.
Even the grisly and comprehensive massacres had not crushed the spirit of the heretics and the Dominican monk, “Robert le Bougre”, Robert the Bugger, as he was commonly called, was sent with ghastly powers. In 1239, he burned a hundred and twenty-three “Bulgars” in one town. The nobles rebelled in 1240, and the people often rioted from their enforced impoverishment from confiscation and unrelenting persecution. Among the Inquisition's accusations against the Cathars was that they had the remains of Christ, that they worshipped a head, that they worshipped John the Baptist, according to Anthony Harris in the supposedly historical parts of a book of ridiculous speculation. When Montsegur was about to succumb, it is said that four Parfaits were allowed to take something out of the citadel. In 1244, the royal officers assisting the Inquisition seized the heretical citadel of Montségur, and 200 Cathari were burned in one day. Moreover, the church decreed severe chastisement against all laymen suspected of sympathy with the heretics. The repression was unimaginable.
There were some recrudescences of heresy, such as that produced by the preaching (1298-1309) of the Catharist minister, Pierre Authier. The people, too, made some attempts to throw off the yoke of the Inquisition and the French—a heretic is described as saying: “Clergy and French, they are one and the same thing”—and insurrections broke out under the leadership of Bernard of Foix, Aimery of Narbonne, and Bernard Delicieux at the beginning of the fourteenth century. Vast inquests, found in the registers of the Inquisitors, Bernard of Caux, Jean de St Pierre, Geoffrey d’Ablis and others, were set up by the Inquisition, terrorizing the district. The sect locally was spent and could find no more adepts in a district which, by the foulest means, had arrived at a state of exhausted peace. After 1330, the records of the Inquisition contain few proceedings against Catharists.
Still, Catharism did not disappear. Hunted down by the Inquisition and abandoned by the nobles, the Albigenses became more and more scattered, hiding in the forests and mountains, and only meeting surreptitiously. The effect was like that of the Irish famine of 1845. Many many people died, but many more escaped to new lands. The Cathars had to move elsewhere to escape, adopting a secret lifestyle. Jean-Claude Dupuis, the Catholic revisionist, admits “it transformed itself into a secret society”. Many went underground, hiding in forests and mountains, and meeting only in secret. The survivors remained convinced they were right. The deeds of the Catholic Church proved it was Satanic. The Church created the witch’s coven!
Innocent III savagely uprooted the heretical belief in a simple way—he aimed to kill off the believers, first with the Albigensian crusade, then for any remnants left in hiding, he bequethed as deadly and repulsive a gift as his massacre—the foundations of the Inquisition. The crusaders came, and their unfinished work was taken up and executed to the bitter end by the Inquisition. It took another 200 years of the Inquisition operating in Toulouse and Albi for the heresy to be defeated in the Languedoc. It left a ruined and impoverished country, with shattered industry and failing commerce. A people of rare and creative culture had been tortured and murdered into extinction. Harold Bayley concludes that…
…the scattered civilization of Provence reunited in secrecy, and that in the course of time it reimposed its influence upon Europe.
The troubadours stood for those opposed to Catholic Christianity. From south west France, they found asylum in all parts of Europe, where they kept alive the story of clerical barbarity. Crushed and scattered, the civilization of Provence continued for subsequent centuries elsewhere, perpetuating the heretical struggle.
The heretical sects flourished almost solely among the artisan classes. They were associated with the crafts and some of their names reflect crafts like Tixerands (weavers) and Patarenes (rag-pickers). Papermaking was among the main crafts of the Albigensians, and papermaking and printing largely remained in heretical hands. The persecution scattered the sufferers, but they clung to their traditions, conforming outwardly to the religions of the countries in which they took refuge. The spread of papermaking in Europe marks the trail of Albigensian exiles to the rest of the Continent, small bands penetrating to England, where history knew them under the name of Lollards.
- See also Cathars, Heretics and Heresy by Gilles Nullens
