crozada, they called the campaign: a ‘crusade’. Yet although the word would in time be applied retrospectively to the great expedition that had been launched by Urban, the crusade against the Albigensians was war of a kind that Christians had never fought before. It was not, as Charlemagne’s campaigns against the Saxons had been, an exercise in territorial expansion; nor was it, in the manner of the crusades that aimed at the liberation of Jerusalem, an armed pilgrimage to a destination of transcendent holiness. Rather, it had as its goal the extirpation of dangerous beliefs. Only blood could
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