Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

Although calling a crusade on Christian soil was a drastic and unprecedented step, it found rapid favor with the king and northern French nobility. The South of France was to them an almost foreign realm. Hot and sensuous, and linguistically different from the north with its Occitan dialect, it had for a long time been distant from the reach of royal government. This was highly displeasing to Philip Augustus, whose goal throughout his reign was to establish his crown’s authority over a greater portion of the kingdom than had recently been the case.* Philip had no great wish to go crusading himself—his experience on the Third Crusade as a younger man had been quite enough excitement—but he still lent his tacit support to the crusade against the Cathars within his realm, calculating that it would be useful means of breaking the autonomy of men like the Count of Toulouse. Command of the anti-Cathar army was entrusted to an experienced crusader: Simon de Montfort, a veteran of the Fourth Crusade and a tireless, stiff-necked zealot, whose life’s driving passion was slaughtering infidels wherever he could find them.* In the Albigensian Crusade he found the perfect outlet for his bloodlust. From June 1209 for a full two years, Simon de Montfort and his fellow crusaders cut a swath through the French south, besieging towns suspected of harboring Cathars, and burning, slicing, or torturing people to death. De Montfort hunted heretics in places like Béziers and Carcassonne, Minerve ...