CATHARS: Like the Manichaeans in the first few centuries of the Christian era, the Cathars were not so much a troublesome heresy within the Church as a fully-fledged alternative to mainstream Christianity. Like the Manichaeans also, they quickly set up a Church hierarchy, complete with bishops; there were eleven by the end of the twelfth century. This made them even more dangerous in the eyes of the Catholic Church - which had problems enough of its own, with a series of schismatic 'antipopes' supported by the Holy Roman Emperor. The Church was a political power, reinforced by its power over men's souls. A competing religion, which condemned the riches of the Catholic Church, was a threat to its temporal power as well as to its spiritual power.

It is clear that the Cathars of what is now southern France were deeply influenced by the Bogomils; it is likely that they were a direct spiritual descendant. A Bogomil bishop, Nicetas, presided over a major Cathar council in 1167, and helped plan their organization. 'Cathari' comes from the Latin for 'pure ones', or perfecti; Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie disputes this, saying that 'In fact "Cathar" comes from a German word the meaning of which has nothing to do with purity,' though unfortunately he doesn't identify the word. Their other common name, the Albigensians, is taken from the town of Aibi, a major Cathar centre in the Languedoc region of southern France.

(The people of the Languedoc had their own language and very much their own culture; unlike the northern French, they were literate, educated, artistic and tolerant of different views. They are perhaps best known for the wandering poet-musicians, the troubadours. Their culture and group of language dialects are now generally known as Provencal. The two language groups - loosely the far Southern and the Northern French - were distinguished by the words used for 'yes': langue d'oc and langue d'oi'l, the latter becoming oui.)

Like the Bogomils and the Manichaeans, the Cathars believed in a Good Principle (Spirit) and an Evil Principle (Matter). Spirit was trapped in matter by the Evil One; Christ had come, as a spirit being and not as a man, to show how it might be freed. The crucifixion and resurrection were not physical events; the cross, therefore, had no relevance and inspired no reverence.

One could be saved from the round of reincarnation by living a perfect life. The perfecti, both male and female, were the spiritually pure; they ate no meat, eggs or milk (some hardly ate at all), and they abstained from sex, for the same reasons that the Bogomils had done so. Clearly this ascetic lifestyle would not appeal to ordinary people. The majority of members, known as credentes (believers), or in France as bonshommes, lived good but fairly normal lives, taking on the rigours of the perfecti only when they were close to death, through the ritual or sacrament of the consolamentum, the Baptism of the Holy Spirit. This was administered by a perfectus initiator placing his hand on a person's head, much as in the Catholic sacraments of confirmation and ordination. From the ordinary member's point of view, leaving this till his deathbed meant that he could enjoy an ordinary life, including meat and sex; from the perfecti point of view, there was less chance of a new perfectus backsliding into temptation. There are accounts, whether true or not, of people recovering from a seemingly mortal illness after having been given the consolamentum, and being denied food while still in a weakened state; it was better to die through this endura than to return to the world and yield to temptation.

The appeal of Catharism to ordinary people and nobility alike was its contrast with the wealth and hypocrisy of the Catholic Church and its clergy. The perfecti were genuinely pious, while the bonshommes were indeed good men - and women: Catharism both believed and practised equality of the sexes. For the nobility, the appeal was as much political as spiritual; the Counts of Toulouse and Foix, and the other leaders of what is now southern France, were effectively independent rulers, and resented being vassals of the Catholic king of France.

The Cathars first appeared not in France but in Germany; the first mention of them is in 1143, in Cologne. Within a few years they had spread to France, and by the 1160s they had found their home in southern France and northern Italy. Thirty German missionaries sent to England in the winter of 1166 were quickly dealt with by Henry II; they were branded, flogged and stripped, and sent out to die from exposure.

In 1184 Pope Lucius III, worried by the growing numbers and strength of the heretics, instituted the Inquisition; those suspected of heresy had to prove their innocence; the guilty were to be excommunicated from the Church, then handed over to the secular authorities for punishment. It didn't have a great deal of success until, in 1199, Pope Innocent III declared that heresy was high treason against God, and that convicted heretics' possessions should be split between the Inquisition and local civil authorities, thus ensuring their enthusiastic cooperation.

In 1208 Peter of Castelnau, a papal legate, was sent by Innocent III to convert the Cathars, and perhaps to negotiate with the recently-excommunicated Raymond VI, Count of Toulouse, ruler of much of the Cathar lands. He was murdered by one of Raymond's knights, and the pope took immediate revenge. Until now, crusades had been against Muslims, non-Christians who could be killed without harm to one's soul. Now, for the first time, the pope called a crusade against Christian heretics, declaring it God's will that orthodox Christians should kill heterodox Christians. Under the command of the brutal Simon de Montfort, father and namesake of the future anti-royalist leader of the barons in Britain, over 30,000 lords, knights and other Crusaders from the north of France (which was somewhat less civilized and sophisticated than the Mediterranean south) descended on the Languedoc, with the promise of two years' indulgence and as much booty as they wanted. Tens of thousands of Cathars died during the twenty years of the Albigensian Crusade.

One of the most disgraceful episodes occurred right at the beginning of the crusade in 1209, at the town of Béziers near the Mediterranean coast, where, as in many Cathar dominated areas, Catholics and Cathars lived peaceably and agreeably side-by-side. As the troops prepared to storm the town a soldier asked the papal legate Arnaud, Abbot of Cîteaux, how they should distinguish between true believers and heretics, Catholics and Cathars. Arnaud's response was 'Kill them all; God will know his own'. Between 15,000 and 20,000 men, women and children were massacred at Beziers, some of them while claiming sanctuary in the church.

The sackings, sieges and massacres continued for years. The Cathars' walled city of Carcassonne fell; in Minerve 140 people died in the first mass burning in 1210, and in Lavaur, 400 people. A well-respected and pious Cathar noblewoman, Giraude de Lavaur, was stoned to death in 1211. In 1213 Raymond VI, who had swung from side to side over the years, accepting and then renouncing Catharism, depending on the political pressure put on him, was killed in battle. De Montfort died in 1218, but the campaign continued. In 1229 the northern French annexed the Languedoc by force. Raymond VII of Toulouse gave in, swearing allegiance to the new King Louis IX, and giving up most of his wealth to the Church and the king.

For some years, Cathars had to practise their faith in secret. Many withdrew, along with many Catholic nobles and knights from the Languedoc, to Montségur, a Pyrennean fortress which had withstood de Montfort in 1209. In 1243 a band of Crusaders, realizing they could not storm the fortress, laid siege to it. The siege lasted ten months, because local villagers smuggled food in to the fortress. In 1244 those in the fortress finally surrendered. The Catholics were allowed to live, but over 200 perfecti were burned to death; the stories say that they walked into the flames joyfully, singing hymns.

Legend also says that the night before the surrender, four Cathars were seen climbing down from the fortress on ropes; they escaped, taking with them *the treasure of the Cathars'. Romantic legend says that this treasure was the Grail; it is perhaps more likely to have been their teachings.

The final stronghold of the Cathars, Queribus, fell in 1255. Officially this was the end of Catharism, but many Cathars had gone to northern Italy, where they managed to escape persecution for the remainder of the century; and some went into the Alps, where they survived even longer. It is possible that some went into the Balkans, to merge back into the Bogomils.

There was a minor Cathar revival around the village of Montaillou in the Comte de Foix between 1300 and 1318. The records of the Inquisition conducted by Jacques Fournier (later the Avignon Pope Benedict III) from 1318 to 1325 form the basis of Ladurie's famous historical portrait of the village.

The Albigensian Crusade was a shameful episode in French history. It is perhaps hardly surprising that many French historians skate over it as quickly as possible. An early nineteenth-century English school textbook, W.C.Taylor's A History of France and Normandy, has three brief but telling paragraphs; Andre Maurois' A History of France (1949) has six lines; and Achille Luchaire's Social France at the Time of Philip Augustus - exactly the right period - only has scattered references, in passing, when discussing something else entirely.

The culture of the Languedoc has already been mentioned. Provencal (sometimes called Occitan) culture was way ahead of that of northern France, which some authorities describe as 'barbaric', even in the twelfth century. It might not be too fanciful to suggest that the Languedoc was moving from the Middle Ages into the Renaissance a good two centuries before this occurred in Italy - and it was this flowering of culture which was wiped out by de Montfort's 'Crusaders'. If the Cathars had not been exterminated, and the cultural as well as the spiritual influence of the Languedoc had spread, French history - indeed, European history - might have been entirely different.

But what has been left to us from this period is something which itself greatly affected French and English history and literature. The concepts of chivalry, of courtly love, of questing knights, of the Grail, of the entire Arthurian oeuvre, are something we shall return to later. The significance of the Cathars will become more apparent as we proceed.

The hundred years of the Cathars in the late Middle Ages were the strongest and most visible resurgence of Gnostic beliefs until the present day. But from the viewpoint of later history, the Cathars are of most importance for one thing: they were responsible for the development of the Inquisition.

The Order of Dominicans came into being when a certain Dominic (1170-1221), a Catholic preacher of orthodox faith, traveled through the Languedoc with the Bishop of Osma, talking to Cathars, debating the two faiths with them, preaching 'the true faith' to them, and winning some conversions in 1206. Dominic took no part in the Albigensian Crusade which began in 1208, when Cathars were killed without any attempt at conversion; he just kept on debating and preaching. Pope Honorius III was so impressed with his work that in 1216-1217 he sanctioned a new Order, the Order of Friars Preachers, commonly known as the Dominicans, specifically to deal with the Cathars and other heretics; Dominic, through his work, had led to their foundation in 1215, in Toulouse, right in the midst of the Cathars.

Dominic was first and foremost a preacher and a teacher of preachers, a monk who did not believe that poverty had to include poverty of mind. But in 1233, twelve years after Dominic's death and a year before his canonization, Pope Gregory IX put the Dominicans in charge of the Inquisition. The rest is history. Dominic, who by all accounts was a gentle and good man, would have been horrified.

It is interesting to read a Roman Catholic comment on the 'poison' of the Cathars, and the work of

the office of Inquisitors, to whom it belonged to sift all cases of suspected heresy, to save those whom ignorant zeal or jealous malice accused unjustly, to teach and reclaim those who had been led astray, and in case of obstinacy to declare the offender an enemy of the Christian name, one whom the Church, unable truthfully to claim, left to the vengeance of the Christian State against whose fundamental laws he rebelled.

The long and arduous task was at length successful, and by the end of the fourteenth century Albigensianism, with all other forms of Catharism, was practically extinct.'

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