Albigensian Crusade

The Albigensian Crusade (), also known as the Cathar Crusade (1209–1229), was a military and ideological campaign initiated by Pope Innocent III to eliminate Catharism in Languedoc, what is now southern France. The Crusade was prosecuted primarily by the French crown and promptly took on a political aspect. It resulted in the significant reduction of practicing Cathars and a realignment of the County of Toulouse with the French crown. The distinct regional culture of Languedoc was also diminished.

The Cathars originated from an anti-materialist reform movement within the Bogomil churches of the Balkans calling for what they saw as a return to the Christian message of perfection, poverty and preaching, combined with a rejection of the physical. The reforms were a reaction against the often perceived scandalous and dissolute lifestyles of the Catholic clergy. Their theology, Gnostic in many ways, was basically dualist. Several of their practices, especially their belief in the inherent evil of the physical world, conflicted with the doctrines of the Incarnation of Christ and Catholic sacraments. This led to accusations of Gnosticism and attracted the ire of the Catholic establishment. They became known as the Albigensians because many adherents were from the city of Albi and the surrounding area in the 12th and 13th centuries.

Between 1022 and 1163, the Cathars were condemned by eight local church councils, the last of which, held at Tours, declared that all Albigenses should be put into prison and have their property confiscated. The Third Lateran Council of 1179 repeated the condemnation. Innocent III's diplomatic attempts to roll back Catharism were met with little success. After the murder of his legate Pierre de Castelnau in 1208, and suspecting that Raymond VI, Count of Toulouse was responsible, Innocent III declared a crusade against the Cathars. He offered the lands of the Cathar heretics to any French nobleman willing to take up arms.

From 1209 to 1215, the Crusaders experienced great success, capturing Cathar lands and systematically crushing the movement. From 1215 to 1225, a series of revolts caused many of the lands to be regained by the counts of Toulouse. A renewed crusade resulted in the recapturing of the territory and effectively drove Catharism underground by 1244. The Albigensian Crusade had a role in the creation and institutionalization of both the Dominican Order and the Medieval Inquisition. The Dominicans promulgated the message of the Church and spread it by preaching the Church's teachings in towns and villages to stop the spread of heresies, while the Inquisition investigated people who were accused of teaching heresies. Because of these efforts, all discernible traces of the Cathar movement were eradicated by the middle of the 14th century. Some historians consider the Albigensian Crusade against the Cathars an act of genocide.

Cathar beliefs and practices

The word "Cathar" is derived from the Greek word katharos, meaning "clean" or "pure." Partially derived from earlier forms of Gnosticism, the theology of the Cathars was dualistic, a belief in two equal and comparable transcendental principles: God, the force of good, and the demiurge, the force of evil. Cathars held that the physical world was evil and created by this demiurge, which they called Rex Mundi (Latin, "King of the World"). Rex Mundi encompassed all that was corporeal, chaotic and powerful.

The Cathar understanding of God was entirely disincarnate: they viewed God as a being or principle of pure spirit completely unsullied by the taint of matter. He was the God of love, order, and peace. Jesus was an angel with only a phantom body, and the accounts of him in the New Testament were to be understood allegorically. According to Cathar teaching, humans originally had no souls. They taught that the evil God, or Satan in another version, either gave new souls to people or used the souls of fallen angels. Alternatively, God took pity on men and gave them souls.

Some Cathars believed in the transmigration of souls, in which the soul went from one body to another. Whether they did so or not, sexual intercourse under all circumstances was a grave sin, because it either brought a new soul into the evil world or perpetuated the cycle of souls being trapped in evil bodies. Civil authority had no claim on a Cathar, since this was the rule of the physical world. Accordingly, the Cathars refused to take oaths of allegiance or volunteer for military service. Cathar doctrine opposed killing animals and consuming meat.

Cathars rejected the Catholic priesthood, labelling its members, including the pope, unworthy and corrupted. Disagreeing on the Catholic concept of the unique role of the priesthood, they taught that anyone, not just the priest, could consecrate the Eucharistic host or hear a confession. There were, however, men selected amongst the Cathars to serve as bishops and deacons. Cathars rejected the dogma of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist and Catholic teaching on the existence of Purgatory.

Cathar meetings were fairly simple. In a typical gathering, those present would make one or more recitations of the Lord's Prayer, make a general confession of sins, ask for forgiveness, and conclude with a common meal. There were however some special rituals. Catharism developed its own unique form of "sacrament" known as the consolamentum, to replace the Catholic rite of baptism. Instead of receiving baptism through water, one received the consolamentum by the laying on of hands.

Cathars regarded water as unclean because it had been corrupted by the earth, and therefore refused to use it in their ceremonies. The act was typically received just before death, as Cathars believed that this increased one's chances for salvation by wiping away all previous sins. After receiving consolamentum, the recipient became known as perfectus. Having become "perfect," the soul, upon the death of the body, could escape the perpetual cycle of death and rebirth and achieve salvation.

Prior to becoming a perfect, believing Cathars were encouraged but not always required to follow Cathar teaching on abstaining from sex and meat, and most chose not to do so. Once an individual received the consolamentum, these rules became binding. Cathar perfects often went through a ritual fast called the endura.

After receiving the consolamentum, a believer would sometimes take no food and rely only on cold water, a practice eventually resulting in death. The procedure was typically performed only by those close to death already. Some members of the Church claimed that if a Cathar upon receiving the consolamentum showed signs of recovery, the person would be smothered to death to ensure entry into Heaven. This sometimes happened, but there is little evidence that it was common practice.

Cathar bishops were selected from among the perfect.

The urbanized character of the Languedoc distinguished it from the more rural north, and more readily allowed for the mixing of different groups of people. This fostered an atmosphere of comparative religious tolerance. Jews in the Languedoc experienced little discrimination, as was the case with the religious dissidents appearing in the area in the 12th century. Muslims were not accorded the same level of tolerance, but Islamic literature and scholarship were respected.

Historian Joseph Strayer summarizes the cultural differences between the North and South as follows:

Growth of Catharism

thumb|300px|A map of [[Languedoc on the eve of the Albigensian Crusade]]

A number of prominent 12th century preachers insisted on it being the responsibility of the individual to develop a relationship with God, independent of an established clergy. Henry of Lausanne criticized the priesthood and called for lay reform of the Church. He gained a large following. Henry's preaching focused on condemning clerical corruption and clerical hierarchy, and there is no evidence that he subscribed to Cathar teachings on dualism. Arnold of Brescia, leader of the Arnoldists, was hanged in 1155 and his body burnt and thrown into the Tiber River, "for fear", one chronicler says, "lest the people might collect them and honour them as the ashes of a martyr". The Waldensians, followers of Peter Waldo, experienced burnings and massacres.

Although these dissenting groups shared some common features with the Cathars, such as anti-clericalism and rejection of the sacraments, they did not subscribe to Cathar dualist beliefs. They did not specifically invoke dualism as a tenet. The Cathars may have originated directly from the Bogomils of Bulgaria, as some scholars, including the historian Steven Runciman, have expressed belief in a continuous Manichaean tradition which encompassed both groups. That view is not universally shared. Following the First Crusade, Latin settlers established a dualist community in Constantinople in the Byzantine Empire. It is theorized that this group provided Westerners with Latin translations of Greek Bogomil texts, which included the consolamentum ritual, thus helping to generate the first organized dualist movement in Western Europe.

By the 12th century, organized groups of dissidents, such as the Waldensians and Cathars, were beginning to appear in the towns and cities of newly urbanized areas. In western Mediterranean France, one of the most urbanized regions of Europe at the time, the Cathars grew to represent a popular mass movement, and the belief was spreading to other areas. One such area was Lombardy, which by the 1170s was sustaining a community of Cathars. The Cathar movement was seen by some as a reaction against the corrupt and earthly lifestyles of the clergy. It has also been viewed as a manifestation of dissatisfaction with papal power.

The Cathar movement occasionally mingled with Waldensianism. However, it was distinct from it, for while Waldensians agreed with the Cathars in their opposition to the Catholic hierarchy and emphasis on poverty and simplicity, they generally accepted most Catholic teachings. Both movements eventually came under violent persecution, but the main energies of the Church were directed against Catharism, which was both the more radical and the more numerous of the two sects.

In Cologne in 1163, four Cathar men and a girl who had traveled to the city from Flanders were burned after refusing to repent. Burnings for heresy had been very uncommon, and in the past had sometimes taken place at the behest of noblemen for political rather than religious reasons over the objections of leading Catholic clergy. After this event however, they grew more frequent. Contact was maintained between the older dualist communities in the Byzantine Empire in the east and the new ones in Western Europe. Emissaries from the former strengthened the dualist beliefs of the latter.

thumb|This [[Pedro Berruguete work of the 15th century depicts a story of Saint Dominic and the Albigensians, in which the texts of each were cast into a fire, but only Saint Dominic's proved miraculously resistant to the flames.]]

Catharism continued to spread, but it had its greatest success in the Languedoc. Cathars established virtually no presence in England, and communities in the kingdoms of France and Germany generally did not last long. It was in the Languedoc that they were the most durable. The Cathars were known as Albigensians because of their association with the city of Albi, and because the 1176 Church council which declared the Cathar doctrine heretical was held near Albi. The condemnation was repeated through the Third Lateran Council of 1179. and the crusade was left in temporary disarray. The command passed to the more cautious Philip II of France, who was reluctant to vigorously prosecute the crusade. At the time, he was still heavily involved in conflict with King John of England.

Montfort then had to put down an uprising in Toulouse before heading west to capture Bigorre, but he was repulsed at Lourdes in December 1216. On 12 September 1217, Raymond retook Toulouse without a fight while Montfort was occupied in the Foix region. Montfort hurried back, but his forces were insufficient to retake the town before campaigning halted. Responding to a call from Pope Honorius III to renew the crusade, Montfort resumed the siege in the spring of 1218. On 25 June or 29, while attempting to fend off a sally by the defenders, Montfort was struck and killed by a stone hurled from defensive siege equipment. Toulouse was held, and the Crusaders driven back. Popular accounts state that the city's artillery was operated by the women and girls of Toulouse. In August, reacting to the crusade's recent failures, Honorius restored full crusading indulgences to those fighting against the Cathars.

The crusade continued with renewed vigour. Philip refused to command in person, but agreed to appoint his son, the also reluctant Prince Louis, to lead an expedition. His army marched south beginning in May 1219, passing through Poitou. In June, an army under Amaury de Montfort, son of the late Simon, joined by Louis, besieged Marmande. The town fell in June 1219. Its occupants, excluding only the commander and his knights, were massacred. After capturing Marmande, Louis attempted to retake Toulouse. Following a siege of six weeks, the army abandoned the mission and went home. Honorius III called the endeavour a "miserable setback". Without Louis's troops, Amaury was unable to hold on to the lands that he had taken, and the Cathars were able to retake much of their land.

Castelnaudary was retaken by troops under Raymond VII. Amaury again besieged the town from July 1220 to March 1221, but it withstood an eight-month assault. In 1221, the success of Raymond and his son continued: Montréal and Fanjeaux were retaken and many Catholics were forced to flee. By 1222, Raymond VII had reclaimed all the lands that had been lost. That same year, Raymond VI died and was succeeded by Raymond VII. On 14 July 1223, Philip II died, and Louis VIII succeeded him as king. In 1224, Amaury de Montfort abandoned Carcassonne. Raymond VII returned from exile to reclaim the area. That same year, Amaury ceded his remaining lands to Louis VIII.

French royal intervention

In November 1225, the Council of Bourges convened to deal with the Cathar heresy. At the council, Raymond VII, like his father previously, was excommunicated. The council gathered a thousand churchmen to authorize a tax on their annual incomes, the "Albigensian tenth", to support the Crusade, though permanent reforms intended to fund the papacy in perpetuity foundered.

Louis VIII headed the new crusade. He took the cross in January 1226. His army assembled at Bourges in May. While the exact number of troops present is unknown, it was certainly the largest force ever sent against the Cathars. Louis set out with his army in June. The Crusaders captured once more the towns of Béziers, Carcassonne, Beaucaire, and Marseille, this time with no resistance. However, Avignon, nominally under the rule of the German emperor, did resist, refusing to open its gates to the French troops. Not wanting to storm the well-fortified walls of the town, Louis settled in for a siege. A frontal assault that August was fiercely beaten back. Finally, in early September, the town surrendered, agreeing to pay 6,000 marks and destroy its walls. The town was occupied on 9 September. No killing or looting took place. Louis VIII died in November and was succeeded by the child king Louis IX. But Queen-regent Blanche of Castile allowed the crusade to continue under Humbert V de Beaujeu. Labécède fell in 1227 and Vareilles in 1228. At that time, the Crusaders once again besieged Toulouse. While doing so, they systematically laid waste to the surrounding landscape: uprooting vineyards, burning fields and farms, and slaughtering livestock. Eventually, the city was retaken. Raymond did not have the manpower to intervene.

Eventually, Queen Blanche offered Raymond VII a treaty recognizing him as ruler of Toulouse in exchange for his fighting the Cathars, returning all church property, turning over his castles and destroying the defences of Toulouse. Moreover, Raymond had to marry his daughter Joan to Louis' brother Alphonse of Poitiers, with the couple and their heirs obtaining Toulouse after Raymond's death, and the inheritance reverting to the king. Raymond agreed and signed the Treaty of Paris at Meaux on 12 April 1229.

Historian Daniel Power notes that the fact that Peter of Vaux-de-Cernay's Historia Albigensis, which many historians of the crusade rely heavily upon, was published only in 1218 leaves a shortage of primary source material for events after that year. Accordingly, there is more difficulty in discerning the nature of various events during the subsequent time period.

Inquisition

With the military phase of the campaign against the Cathars now primarily at an end, the Inquisition was established under Pope Gregory IX in 1234 to uproot heretical movements, including the remaining Cathars. Operating in the south at Toulouse, Albi, Carcassonne and other towns during the whole of the 13th century, and a great part of the 14th, it succeeded in crushing Catharism as a popular movement and driving its remaining adherents underground.

Punishments for Cathars varied greatly. Most frequently, they were made to wear yellow crosses atop their garments as a sign of outward penance. Others made obligatory pilgrimages, which often included fighting against Muslims. Visiting a local church naked once each month to be scourged was also a common punishment, including for returned pilgrims. Cathars who were slow to repent or who relapsed suffered imprisonment and, often, the loss of property. Others who altogether refused to repent were burned. The vast majority of those accused escaped death and were sentenced to a lighter penalty.

156px|thumb|The type of [[Cathar yellow cross|yellow cross worn by Cathar repentants]]

Friars of the Dominican Order, often called after their founder, Saint Dominic, would travel to towns and villages preaching in favor of the teachings of the Church and against heresy. In some cases, they took part in prosecuting Cathars.

From 1242 to 1243, Raymond VII, in alliance with King Henry III of England, launched an unsuccessful rebellion against France. In May 1242, two Inquisitors were assassinated at Avignonet-Lauragais. From May 1243 to March 1244, the Cathar fortress of Montségur was besieged by the troops of the seneschal of Carcassonne and Pierre Amiel, the Archbishop of Narbonne. On 16 March 1244, in retaliation for the killing of the Inquisitors nearly two years earlier, a large massacre took place, in which over 200 Cathar perfects were burnt in an enormous pyre at the prat dels cremats ("field of the burned") near the foot of the castle. Included in the massacre was Bertrand Marty, the Cathar bishop of Toulouse from 1225.

After this, Catharism did not completely vanish, but was practiced by its remaining adherents in secret. The Inquisition continued to search for and attempt to prosecute Cathars. While few prominent men joined the Cathars, a small group of ordinary followers remained and were generally successful at concealing themselves. The Inquisitors sometimes used torture as a method to find Cathars, but still were able to catch only a relatively small number.

Raymond died in 1249, and when Alphonse died in 1271, the County of Toulouse was annexed by the Kingdom of France. The Inquisition received funding from the French monarchy. In the 1290s, King Philip IV, who was in conflict with Pope Boniface VIII, limited its funding and severely restricted its activities. However, after visiting southern France in 1303, he became alarmed by the anti-monarchical sentiments of the people in the region, especially in Carcassonne, and decided to remove the restrictions placed on the Inquisition.

Pope Clement V introduced new rules designed to protect the rights of the accused. The Dominican Bernard Gui, Inquisitor of Toulouse from 1308 to 1323, wrote a manual discussing the customs of non-Catholic sects and the methods to be employed by the Inquisitors in combating heresy. A large portion of the manual describes the reputed customs of the Cathars, while contrasting them with those of Catholics. Gui described methods to be used for interrogating accused Cathars. He ruled that any person found to have died without confessing his known heresy would have his or her remains exhumed and burned, while any person known to have been a heretic but not known whether to have confessed or not would have his or her body unearthed but not burned. Under Gui, a final push against Catharism began. By 1350, all known remnants of the movement had been extinguished.

Legacy

Influence

According to Edward Peters, the violence of the Albigensian Crusade was not in line with the reforms and plans of Innocent, who stressed confession, reform of the clergy and laity, and pastoral teachings to oppose heresy. Peters maintains that the violence was due to the crusade being under the control of mobs, petty rulers, and local bishops who did not uphold Innocent's ideas. The uncontainable, prejudicial passion of local mobs and heresy hunters, the violence of secular courts, and the bloodshed of the Albigensian Crusade sparked a desire within the papacy to implement greater control over the prosecution of heresy. This desire led to the development of organized legal procedures for dealing with heretics.

As a result of the Albigensian Crusade, there were only a small number of French recruits for the Fifth and Sixth crusades. Strayer argues that the Albigensian Crusade increased the power of the French monarchy and made the papacy more dependent on it, eventually leading to the Avignon Papacy.

Numerous songs concerning the Albigensian Crusade survive from the troubadour poet-composers, particularly those who were also knights. For instance, the troubadour Raimon de Miraval wrote a song pleading with Peter II to recapture his castle which had been captured by Simon, while a co-written song by the troubadours Tomier and Palaizi condemns the treatment of Raymond VI and urges him to fight back. The epic poem Canso de la Crozada () was written in the early 13th century and narrates the Albigensian Crusade. The crusade and its immediate aftermath inaugurated the eventual decline of the troubadour tradition. Many Occitan courts had been patrons of the troubadours, and their destruction resulted in the gradual deterioration of the practice and the immigration of most troubadours from Southern France to royal courts in Italy, Spain and Hungary.

Genocide

thumb|upright=1.6|[[Pope Innocent III excommunicating the Albigensians (left). Massacre against the Albigensians by the Crusaders (right).]]

Raphael Lemkin, who coined the word "genocide" in the 20th century, referred to the Albigensian Crusade as "one of the most conclusive cases of genocide in religious history". Mark Gregory Pegg wrote, "The Albigensian Crusade ushered genocide into the West by linking divine salvation to mass murder, by making slaughter as loving an act as His sacrifice on the cross."

Robert E. Lerner argued that Pegg's classification of the Albigensian Crusade as a genocide was inappropriate on the grounds that it "was proclaimed against unbelievers ... not against a 'genus' or people; those who joined the crusade had no intention of annihilating the population of southern France ... If Pegg wishes to connect the Albigensian Crusade to modern ethnic slaughter, well—words fail me (as they do him)."

Laurence Marvin is not as dismissive as Lerner regarding Pegg's contention that the Albigensian Crusade was a genocide, but he takes issue with Pegg's argument that the Albigensian Crusade formed an important historical precedent for later genocides, including the Holocaust.

Kurt Jonassohn and Karin Solveig Björnson describe the Albigensian Crusade as "the first ideological genocide". Kurt Jonassohn and Frank Chalk (who together founded the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies) include a detailed case study of the Albigensian Crusade in their genocide studies textbook The History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case Studies, authored by Strayer and Malise Ruthven.

References

Bibliography

Secondary sources

Primary sources

Further reading

External links

• Albigensian Crusade
• The paths of Cathars by the philosopher Yves Maris.
• The English website of the castle of Termes, besieged in 1210
• The Forgotten Kingdom – The Albigensian Crusade – La Capella Reial – Hespèrion XXI, dir. Jordi Savall
• "Traces of the Bogomil Movement in English", Georgi Vassilev. Academie Bulgare des Sciences. Institut d'etudes balkaniques. Études balkaniques, 1994, No 3

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