The Cathars

In the twelfth century, many Christians in western Europe were seeking a purer religious life than they saw in a wealthy and worldly Church. In the towns and villages of Languedoc, between Toulouse and the Mediterranean, and in the cities of northern Italy, preachers gained a following by living in poverty, fasting, avoiding meat and sexual relations, and teaching from the New Testament. Their followers called them good men and good women. Opponents called them heretics, and the names Cathars and Albigensians, after the town of Albi, come mainly from their critics.

Their teaching was dualist. They held that the material world was created or ruled by an evil principle, and that human souls were spirits trapped in bodies. Salvation came through a single sacrament, the consolamentum, a laying-on of hands that made a believer one of the perfected. Most ordinary believers received it only near death.

In Languedoc the movement enjoyed protection from many local nobles. When a papal legate was murdered in 1208, Pope Innocent III called a crusade. From 1209 northern French armies under Simon de Montfort besieged cities and castles, and the war became a struggle for control of the south, ending with the Treaty of Paris in 1229. The war left deep scars. Many towns and noble families lost their lands, and the county of Toulouse eventually passed to the French crown, transforming the political map of southern France for good. Dissenters who survived went into hiding, or fled to Lombardy and Catalonia.

The violence of the crusade is well documented. At Béziers in 1209 the crusaders massacred much of the population, and many dissenters were burned after the fall of towns and castles. From the 1230s the papacy appointed inquisitors, often Dominican friars, to question suspects systematically. Their registers record thousands of interrogations, describing who attended sermons, who sheltered good men and who received the consolamentum. The surrender of Montségur in 1244 and the burning of more than two hundred people there became the symbolic end of the organised movement in Languedoc.

These records are our richest source, but they were produced by the movement’s enemies, often under pressure. The register of Jacques Fournier, later Pope Benedict XII, made famous by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s study of the village of Montaillou, shows how belief was woven into everyday family life in the early fourteenth century.

Scholars disagree about how to interpret this evidence. Many, such as Malcolm Lambert and Malcolm Barber, describe an organised dualist church with bishops and links to the Bogomils of the Balkans. Others, including Mark Pegg and R. I. Moore, argue that churchmen and inquisitors imposed a more unified idea of Catharism on varied local beliefs. The debate continues.

Legends about the Cathars grew mainly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Some testimony from Montségur mentions that a few believers escaped with money before the surrender. From this hint later writers imagined a fabulous treasure, sometimes described as sacred texts or the Holy Grail itself. In the 1930s the German writer Otto Rahn searched for the Grail at Montségur, and his books fed a romantic, and later politically exploited, mythology. Others presented the Cathars as heirs of ancient Gnostic or even Druidic wisdom.

In the south of France, the Cathars also became symbols of regional identity, of Occitan language and culture, and of resistance to northern conquest and religious persecution. Since the late twentieth century the department of Aude has promoted the ruined hilltop castles as Cathar country, attracting many visitors, even though most of these fortresses were rebuilt after the crusade.

The Cathars appear in novels, documentaries and alternative histories, often as gentle mystics with a hidden secret. Historians caution that the real people were medieval Christians with their own beliefs and conflicts. Their story remains compelling because of the very real suffering inflicted on them for their faith. Today a few small groups describe themselves as neo-Cathar, drawing inspiration from the medieval movement, though they have no documented link with it.