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Destiny of Fire
The final installment of Oldenbourg's bestselling and brilliant historical trilogy describes the fate and misfortune of the noble Seigneur of Montgeil and his family, victims of the cruel "Fourth Crusades" at the beginning of the 13th century.
384 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1960
About the author
Zoé Oldenbourg
42 books31 followersZoé Oldenbourg (Russian: Зоя Серге́евна Ольденбург) (March 31, 1916–November 8, 2002) was a Russian-born French historian and novelist who specialized in medieval French history, in particular the Crusades and Cathars.
She was born in Petrograd, Russia into a family of scholars and historians. Her father Sergei was a journalist and historian, her mother Ada Starynkevich was a mathematician, and her grandfather Sergei was the permanent secretary of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Saint Petersburg.Her early childhood was spent among the privations of the Russian revolutionary period and the first years of Communism. Her father fled the country and established himself as a journalist in Paris.
With her family, she emigrated to Paris in 1925 at the age of nine and graduated from the Lycée Molière in 1934 with her Baccalauréat diploma. She went on to study at the Sorbonne and then she studied painting at the Académie Ranson. In 1938 she spent a year in England and studied theology. During World War II she supported herself by hand-painting scarves.
She was encouraged by her father to write and she completed her first work, a novel, Argiles et cendres in 1946. Although she wrote her first works in Russian, as an adult she wrote almost exclusively in French.
She married Heinric Idalovici in 1948 and had two children, Olaf and Marie-Agathe.
She combined a genius for scholarship and a deep feeling for the Middle Ages in her historical novels. The World is Not Enough, a vast panorama of the twelfth century immediately put her in the ranks of the foremost historical novelists. Her second, The Cornerstone, won her the Prix Femina and was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection in America. Other works include The Awakened, The Chains of Love, Massacre at Montsegur, Destiny of Fire, Cities of the Flesh, and Catherine the Great, a Literary Guild selection. In The Crusades, Zoe Oldenbourg returned to the Middle Ages she knew and loved so well.
She won the Prix Femina for her 1953 novel La Pierre Angulaire.
She was born in Petrograd, Russia into a family of scholars and historians. Her father Sergei was a journalist and historian, her mother Ada Starynkevich was a mathematician, and her grandfather Sergei was the permanent secretary of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Saint Petersburg.Her early childhood was spent among the privations of the Russian revolutionary period and the first years of Communism. Her father fled the country and established himself as a journalist in Paris.
With her family, she emigrated to Paris in 1925 at the age of nine and graduated from the Lycée Molière in 1934 with her Baccalauréat diploma. She went on to study at the Sorbonne and then she studied painting at the Académie Ranson. In 1938 she spent a year in England and studied theology. During World War II she supported herself by hand-painting scarves.
She was encouraged by her father to write and she completed her first work, a novel, Argiles et cendres in 1946. Although she wrote her first works in Russian, as an adult she wrote almost exclusively in French.
She married Heinric Idalovici in 1948 and had two children, Olaf and Marie-Agathe.
She combined a genius for scholarship and a deep feeling for the Middle Ages in her historical novels. The World is Not Enough, a vast panorama of the twelfth century immediately put her in the ranks of the foremost historical novelists. Her second, The Cornerstone, won her the Prix Femina and was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection in America. Other works include The Awakened, The Chains of Love, Massacre at Montsegur, Destiny of Fire, Cities of the Flesh, and Catherine the Great, a Literary Guild selection. In The Crusades, Zoe Oldenbourg returned to the Middle Ages she knew and loved so well.
She won the Prix Femina for her 1953 novel La Pierre Angulaire.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
July 15, 2014
I like all of the novels written by Zoe Oldenbourg read to date, but this is the favorite. Although often seen as the conclusion of a trilogy, it stands alone. Indeed, I read them out of sequence, picking this book up simply because it was about Catharism.
The word "cathar" means something like "pure" and the cathari were a dualistic Christian sect which did maintain an ontological distinction between this corruptible world of the flesh and an eternal world of the spirit, identifying with the former. This dualism goes back, of course, to the roots of Christianity and even earlier. One finds it in Platonism as well as in the Pauline epistles. It is perennial belief, even commonsense at some level, but the historical antecedants of the Cathars may, in fact, have been the Bogomils of the Balkans--the religion officially practiced in the short-lived Kingdom of Bosnia.
The Catholic Church naturally did not like this abjuration of the material world as it implicitly represented a critique of the papacy and its real presence in the world as an actual state with aspirations to global supremacy. Furthermore, by eschewing materialism, the Cathari "elect", those who had taken their distinctive sacrament and had devoted themselves to preaching and spiritual perfection, commanded far more respect from their "hearers", those ordinary people committed to family life, than did the often venal priests associated with Rome. The "pure" commanded no armies, demanded no taxes. The Church was seen as an alien oppressor.
The Church's promulgation of plenary indulgences for all who would participate in a crusade against the heretics succeeded because of a confluence of interests between Rome and Paris, between the Church and the French-speaking aristocracy of the north. Both expected to gain by invading Languedoc, destroying the Cathars and their noble defenders, most notably the Raymonds of Toulouse, many of whom were ostensibly Catholic yet jealous of their independence and protective of the pacific Cathars.
Indeed, the Cathars, most of them, refused to fight. In one memorable seige, when amnesty was promised to all knights who would abandon their defence of the Cathari within the citadel, dozens of nobles took the final sacrament, becoming Cathars themselves and, so, insuring their own deaths.
The Crusade was successful, militarily and politically speaking, but the heresies continued. First, Catharism continued for centuries as an underground tradition stretching from Spain to the Balkans, even operating above ground in remote areas. This the Church attempted to stamp out by the instruments of propaganda and inquisition. The Dominican order was espressly established to conduct the campaign, a campaign that included the interrogation of children so as to obtain damning evidences against the parents. Second, the regional identity persisted in opposition to France, its language and its religion. France retaliated by outlawing the very language of of the people--a prohibition which only recently has been lifted.
Oldenbourg's novel tells this story primarily in terms of one noble family, managing to explain both their attachment to their land and to their culture without disrupting the narrative plotting of the story. Reading some of the reviews written by others, I find several complaining that the plot is too top-heavy with theology, too slow. For me, it worked. I rarely weep reading a book. This one caused me to sob on several occasions because of Oldenbourg's ability to sympathetically represent the interiority of her characters so well as to make the loss of one of them akin to the loss of a much beloved friend.
The word "cathar" means something like "pure" and the cathari were a dualistic Christian sect which did maintain an ontological distinction between this corruptible world of the flesh and an eternal world of the spirit, identifying with the former. This dualism goes back, of course, to the roots of Christianity and even earlier. One finds it in Platonism as well as in the Pauline epistles. It is perennial belief, even commonsense at some level, but the historical antecedants of the Cathars may, in fact, have been the Bogomils of the Balkans--the religion officially practiced in the short-lived Kingdom of Bosnia.
The Catholic Church naturally did not like this abjuration of the material world as it implicitly represented a critique of the papacy and its real presence in the world as an actual state with aspirations to global supremacy. Furthermore, by eschewing materialism, the Cathari "elect", those who had taken their distinctive sacrament and had devoted themselves to preaching and spiritual perfection, commanded far more respect from their "hearers", those ordinary people committed to family life, than did the often venal priests associated with Rome. The "pure" commanded no armies, demanded no taxes. The Church was seen as an alien oppressor.
The Church's promulgation of plenary indulgences for all who would participate in a crusade against the heretics succeeded because of a confluence of interests between Rome and Paris, between the Church and the French-speaking aristocracy of the north. Both expected to gain by invading Languedoc, destroying the Cathars and their noble defenders, most notably the Raymonds of Toulouse, many of whom were ostensibly Catholic yet jealous of their independence and protective of the pacific Cathars.
Indeed, the Cathars, most of them, refused to fight. In one memorable seige, when amnesty was promised to all knights who would abandon their defence of the Cathari within the citadel, dozens of nobles took the final sacrament, becoming Cathars themselves and, so, insuring their own deaths.
The Crusade was successful, militarily and politically speaking, but the heresies continued. First, Catharism continued for centuries as an underground tradition stretching from Spain to the Balkans, even operating above ground in remote areas. This the Church attempted to stamp out by the instruments of propaganda and inquisition. The Dominican order was espressly established to conduct the campaign, a campaign that included the interrogation of children so as to obtain damning evidences against the parents. Second, the regional identity persisted in opposition to France, its language and its religion. France retaliated by outlawing the very language of of the people--a prohibition which only recently has been lifted.
Oldenbourg's novel tells this story primarily in terms of one noble family, managing to explain both their attachment to their land and to their culture without disrupting the narrative plotting of the story. Reading some of the reviews written by others, I find several complaining that the plot is too top-heavy with theology, too slow. For me, it worked. I rarely weep reading a book. This one caused me to sob on several occasions because of Oldenbourg's ability to sympathetically represent the interiority of her characters so well as to make the loss of one of them akin to the loss of a much beloved friend.
April 30, 2025
This older historical novel takes place in southern France during the early 13th century and covers the Albigensian Crusade, which wiped out the Cathars (a heretical Christian sect). The narrative centers around the minor Cathar nobles Arsen and Ricord, and their daughter Gentian, as they navigate the persecution and destruction of their sect and community. They are all very devout, yet make different choices about how to face the Crusade against them. Ricord chooses to fight, Arsen to adopt an ascetic, mendicant mission, and Gentian to marry and and try to follow her religion as a wife and mother.
This is a tragic story with vivid characters whose plights I cared about. I especially liked Gentian, a spirited woman caught between her desire for a religious life and the need to live a more worldly life. Arsen was alternately sympathetic and a little frustrating. She had a a great capacity for loving those around her, but also was a bit overly zealous in her pursuit of a as life of stringent observation of Cathar ideals. Indeed, the one drawback of the book for me was that a lot of time and space was given over to the religious ruminations and discussions within and between the characters, and that much theological content is just not my thing. It did serve to illuminate the senselessness of the religious intolerance and perseuction of the era, though.
This is a tragic story with vivid characters whose plights I cared about. I especially liked Gentian, a spirited woman caught between her desire for a religious life and the need to live a more worldly life. Arsen was alternately sympathetic and a little frustrating. She had a a great capacity for loving those around her, but also was a bit overly zealous in her pursuit of a as life of stringent observation of Cathar ideals. Indeed, the one drawback of the book for me was that a lot of time and space was given over to the religious ruminations and discussions within and between the characters, and that much theological content is just not my thing. It did serve to illuminate the senselessness of the religious intolerance and perseuction of the era, though.
June 8, 2025
He disfrutado mucho de esta obra, se entiende mucho el concepto de pensamiento de la época y empatizas en los sucesos crueles acaecidos a las personas. Se palpa la injusticia del momento x tener ideas diferentes.
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August 19, 2021Quería conocer la historia de los cataros y entiendo que la autora lo hizo bien, pero no me ha gustado el ritmo de la historia…
January 17, 2026
No es facil de llegir. Es molt interessant
September 23, 2009
I just read the terrific review by Ellie Reasoner of Destiny of Fire.
After reading Oldenbourg's impressive, nonfiction account of the Crusades I wanted to try her fiction. So I picked up Destiny and was fascinated and repelled at the same time. Oldenbourg did not flinch when describing the horrifying genocide inflicted on the Cathars by the Church.
At some point, maybe half way through, the harsh reality of the time became too much. I stopped reading. That was many years ago. Would I be able to read it now? I'm not sure, but I am tempted to try.
After reading Oldenbourg's impressive, nonfiction account of the Crusades I wanted to try her fiction. So I picked up Destiny and was fascinated and repelled at the same time. Oldenbourg did not flinch when describing the horrifying genocide inflicted on the Cathars by the Church.
At some point, maybe half way through, the harsh reality of the time became too much. I stopped reading. That was many years ago. Would I be able to read it now? I'm not sure, but I am tempted to try.
November 19, 2012
This is about as perfect as books can get. The author, an expert on this period, makes her characters live and breathe.
I have yet to read anything else that so accurately shows us what it is to be human: to hope, to dream, to believe, to love. The indomitable nature of faith and principle in the face of fear and oppression. Our capacity for good and, sadly, our capacity for true evil.
I have yet to read anything else that so accurately shows us what it is to be human: to hope, to dream, to believe, to love. The indomitable nature of faith and principle in the face of fear and oppression. Our capacity for good and, sadly, our capacity for true evil.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews