Of Cathars, Catholics and Crusaders

Crusading fervour was at its height in the medieval period. ‘Free Jerusalem!’ Death to the infidel!’ ‘God wills it!’ These were the rallying cries that drove men – and some women – from their homes, to mortgage their lands, to risk their lives in arduous travel and then face the Saracens in battle. But, as we know, many were diverted along the way by the promises of Venice, the riches of Constantinople, attacks on Jews and never made it to the Holy Land. Of those who did survive the trek, the great lords were at least as interested in carving out principalities for themselves, as they were in freeing the holy places. Lesser men were greedy for loot to take home.

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In the early 13th century, Pope Innocent III, who is considered one of the most powerful of the medieval popes, proclaimed a crusade. Not against the infidel in the Holy Land but against French Christians in Languedoc. It is known as the Albigensian Crusade and was directed against a people who believed and practised their religion differently than Orthodox Catholics: a heretical sect called Cathars. As a bonus, to stir the zeal of prospective crusaders, who might have preferred the Holy Land, Innocent offered them any land taken from Cathars – land, incidentally, of which King Philip II was suzerain.

One could recognise a Saracen by his brown face and mode of dress, but how to tell a Catholic from a Cathar, unless the latter was discovered during one of their rituals? But did it really matter? Is it true that Arnald-Amalric, Abbot of Citeaux said during the assault on Beziers, ‘Kill them all. God will know his own.’? Whether he said it or not, the French knights went at it with crusading zeal. Thousands of Cathars went to the stake. Many more thousands of orthodox Catholics were killed in battle, during sieges, or by execution.

The Albigensian Crusade is a shameful episode in the history of the Church, and the subject of my new book.