Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

Cathars, who were the unlucky targets of Innocent’s Albigensian Crusade, had been known in Europe since at least the 1170s, when a grand assembly of Church leaders known as the Third Lateran Council declared the Cathars’ beliefs “a loathsome heresy.” And it was true that these were unorthodox people, who took the tradition of Christian asceticism far beyond what had been developed even by Bernard of Clairvaux’s Cistercians. Their first principles were uncontroversial: Cathars regarded human flesh as by its nature sinful and detestable—a view that, as we have seen, Innocent had once professed wholeheartedly to share. They thought the only route to escape from mortal corruption was by living according to a strict doctrine of self-denial: sexual abstinence, vegetarianism, and simplicity of life. In this they were not very different from, say, the orders of mendicant friars who were emerging in Europe at roughly the same time. However, Cathars crossed from Christian asceticism into heresy by rejecting the hierarchy of the western Church in favor of their own private priesthood, and refusing the Eucharist, baptism, and other Church rites. This put them quite beyond the pale—especially