The Cathars were a religious group who appeared in Europe in the eleventh century, their origins something of a mystery though there is reason to believe their ideas came from Persia by way of the Byzantine Empire, the Balkans and Northern Italy. Records from the Roman Catholic Church mention them under various names and in various places. Catholic theologians debated with themselves for centuries whether Cathars were Christian heretics or whether they were not Christians at all. The question is apparently still open. Roman Catholics still refer to Cathar belief as "the Great Heresy" though the current official Catholic position is that Catharism is not Christian at all.
Cathars
believed in two principles, a good creator god and his evil
adversary (much like God and Satan of mainstream Christianity).
Cathars called themselves Christians; their neighbours distinguished
them as "Good Christians". The Catholic Church
called them Cathars or Albigenses. Cathars maintained a
Church hierarchy
and practiced a range of ceremonies,
but rejected any idea of priesthood or the use of church
buildings. They divided into ordinary
believers who led ordinary medieval lives and an inner
Elect
of Parfaits (men) and Parfaites (women) who led extremely
ascetic lives yet still worked for their living - generally
in itinerant manual trades like weaving. Cathars believed
in reincarnation
and refused
to eat meat or other animal products. They were strict
about biblical injunctions - notably those about living
in poverty, not telling lies, not killing and not swearing
oaths.
Basic Cathar tenets led to some surprising logical implications. For example they largely regarded men and women as equals, and had no doctrinal objection to contraception, euthanasia or suicide. In some respects the Cathar and Catholic Churches were polar opposites. For example the Cathar Church taught that all non-procreative sex was better than any procreative sex. The Catholic Church taught - and still teaches - exactly the opposite. Both positions produced interesting results. Following their tenet, Catholics concluded that masturbation was a far greater sin than rape, as mediaeval penitentials confirm. Following their principles, Cathar could deduce that sexual intercourse between man and wife was more culpable than homosexual sex.
In
the Languedoc, famous at the time for its high culture,
tolerance and liberalism, the Cathar religion took root
and gained more and more adherents during the twelfth century.
By the early thirteenth century Catharism was probably the
majority religion in the area, supported by the nobility
as well as the common people. This was yet another annoyance
to the Roman Church which considered the feudal system to
be divinely ordained as the natural
order (Cathars disliked it because it depended on oath
taking). In open debates with leading Catholic theologians
Cathars seem invariably to have come out on top. This was
embarrassing for the Roman Church, not least because they
had fielded the best professional preachers in Europe against
what they saw as a collection of uneducated weavers and
other manual workers. Worse still a number of Catholic priests
had become Cathar adherents (Catharism was a religion that
seems to have appealed especially to the theologically literate
and whole Cathedral chapters are known to have defected,
as they did for example at Orleans). Worse, the Catholic
Church was held up to public ridicule (some of the richest
men in Christendom, bejeweled, dressed in finery, and preaching
poverty, provided an irresistible target even to fellow
Catholics). Worst yet, Cathars in the Languedoc refused
to pay tithes to the Catholic Church.
The Cathar view of the Catholic Church was as bleak as the Catholic Church's view of the Cathar Church. On the Cathar side it manifested itself in ridiculing Catholic doctrine and practices, and characterising the Catholic Church as the "Church of Wolves". The Catholics accused Cathars of heresy or apostasy and said they belonged to the "Synagogue of Satan". The Catholic side created some striking propaganda. When the propaganda proved only partly successful, there was only one option left - a crusade - the Albigensian Crusade.
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From
1208, a war of terror was waged against the indigenous population
and their rulers: Raymond VI of Toulouse, Raymond-Roger Trencavel, Raymond
Roger of Foix in the first generation and Raymond
VII of Toulouse, Raymond Trencavel II, and Roger Bernard II of Foix in the second
generation. During this period
an estimated 500,000 Languedoc men women and children were
massacred - Catholics as well as Cathars. The Counts
of Toulouse and their allies
were dispossessed and humiliated, and their lands annexed
to France. Educated and tolerant Languedoc rulers
were replaced by relative barbarians; Dominic Guzmán
(later Saint
Dominic) founded the Dominican Order and soon afterwards
the Inquisition,
manned by his Dominicans, was established explicitly to
wipe out the last vestiges of resistance. Persecutions of
Languedoc
Jews and other minorities were initiated; the
culture of the troubadours
was lost as their cultured patrons were reduced to wandering
refugees known as faidits. Their characteristic concept
of "paratge",
a whole sophisticated world-view, was almost destroyed,
leaving us a pale imitation in our idea of chivalry. Lay
learning was discouraged and the reading of the bible became
a capital crime. Tithes were enforced. The Languedoc started
its long economic decline to become the poorest region in
France; and the language of the area, Occitan,
began its descent from the foremost literary language in
Europe to a regional dialect, now disparaged as a patois.
At the end of the extermination of the Cathars, the Roman Church had convincing proof that a sustained campaign of genocide can work. It also had the precedent of an internal Crusade within Christendom, and the machinery of the first modern police state that could be wheeled out for the Spanish Inquisition, and again for later Inquisitions and genocides.
The crusade against the Cathars of the Languedoc has been described as one of the greatest disasters ever to befall Europe.
Catharism
is often said to have been completely eradicated by the
end of the fourteenth century. Yet there are more
than a few vestiges
even today, apart from the enduring memory of Cathar martyrdom
and the ruins of the famous "Cathar
castles", including the Château
of Montségur (
Montsegùr).
There are even Cathars alive today, or at least people claiming
to be modern
Cathars. There is a flourishing, if largely superficial,
Cathar tourist industry in the Languedoc, and especially
in the Aude
département; and also an increasing number of
historians and other academics engaged in serious Cathar
studies. Interestingly, to date, the deeper they have dug,
the more they have vindicated
Cathar claims to represent a survival of the Earliest Christian
Church.
Arguably
just as interesting, Protestant
ideas share much in common with Cathar ideas, and there
is reason to believe that early reformers were aware of
the Cathar tradition. Reformers seem to have known things
that the Cathars knew, but the Catholic Church did not -
and even today some Protestant Churches claim a Cathar heritage.
Tantalisingly, weavers were commonly accused of spreading
Protestant ideas in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries,
just as their antecedents in the same trade had been accused
of spreading Cathar ideas in Medieval times.
It can even be argued that in many respects Roman Catholic ideas have shifted over the centuries ever further from the Church's medieval teaching and ever closer to Cathar teaching.
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Click on the links on the menu below for more information on all aspects of the Cathars (or Cathari). Click on the following link to read a short introductory
article about Cathars
and the Crusade against them Click on the following link for recommended
Books on the Cathars 
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Back
to: History in the Languedoc
