Catharism
In 1208, Pierre de Castelnau, Innocent's papal legate, was murdered while returning to Rome after excommunicating Count Raymond VI of Toulouse, who, in his view, was too lenient with the Cathars.
"[17] However the presence of a variety of beliefs and spiritual practices in the French countryside of the 12th and 13th centuries that came to be seen as heterodox relative to the Church in Rome is not actually in question, as the primary documents of the period exhaustively demonstrate.
The missing element is a dissident religious doctrine, for which historians using a fuller range of sources believe thousands of people were prepared to suffer extreme persecution and an agonising death.
John Damascene, writing in the 8th century AD, also notes of an earlier sect called the "Cathari", in his book On Heresies, taken from the epitome provided by Epiphanius of Salamis in his Panarion.
[35] Some gnostic belief systems including Catharism began to characterise the duality of creation as a relationship between hostile opposing forces of good and evil.
Under this view, humans were actually angels seduced by Satan before a war in heaven against the army of Michael, after which they would have been forced to spend an eternity trapped in the evil God's material realm.
[44] Most Cathars did not accept the normative Trinitarian understanding of Jesus, instead resembling nontrinitarian modalistic Monarchianism (Sabellianism) in the West and adoptionism in the East, which might or might not be combined with the mentioned Docetism.
In one version, the Invisible Father had two spiritual wives, Collam and Hoolibam (identified with Oholah and Oholibah), and would himself have provoked the war in heaven by seducing the wife of Satan, or perhaps the reverse.
[52] Many believers would receive the Consolamentum as death drew near, performing the ritual of liberation at a moment when the heavy obligations of purity required of Perfecti would be temporally short.
[56] It was claimed by some of the church writers that when a Cathar, after receiving the Consolamentum, began to show signs of recovery he or she would be smothered in order to ensure his or her entry into paradise.
"[50] It has been alleged that the Cathar Church of the Languedoc had a relatively flat structure, distinguishing between the baptised Perfecti (a term they did not use; instead, bonhommes) and ordinary unbaptised believers (credentes).
In January 1208, the papal legate, Pierre de Castelnau, a Cistercian monk, theologian and canon lawyer, was sent to meet the ruler of the area, Raymond VI, Count of Toulouse.
As soon as he heard of the murder, the Pope ordered the legates to preach a crusade against the Cathars,[59] and wrote a letter to Philip Augustus, King of France, appealing for his intervention—or an intervention led by his son, Louis.
Simon de Montfort was granted the Trencavel lands by Pope Innocent, thus incurring the enmity of Peter II of Aragon, who previously had been aloof from the conflict, even acting as a mediator at the time of the siege of Carcassonne.
With a small force of confederates operating from the main winter camp at Fanjeaux, he was faced with the desertion of local lords who had sworn fealty to him out of necessity—and attempts to enlarge his newfound domain during the summer.
[citation needed] De Montfort's summer campaigns recaptured losses sustained in winter months, in addition to attempts to widen the crusade's sphere of operation.
Arnaud Amalric, the Cistercian abbot-commander, wrote to Pope Innocent III, that during negotiations the boys in his camp (runaways, servants, thieves, young monks)[94] had taken the initiative without waiting for orders.
Prominent opponents of the Crusaders were Raymond Roger Trencavel, viscount of Carcassonne, and his feudal overlord Peter II of Aragon, who held fiefdoms and had a number of vassals in the region.
[102] 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, driving its remaining adherents underground.
[106] On 16 March 1244, a large and symbolically important massacre took place, wherein 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.
[107] A popular though as yet unsubstantiated belief holds that a small party of Cathar Perfects escaped from the fortress prior to the massacre at prat dels cremats.
What this treasure consisted of has been a matter of considerable speculation: claims range from sacred Gnostic texts to the Cathars' accumulated wealth, which might have included the Holy Grail according to Nazi legend-making (see § Historical and current scholarship below).
[115] Mark Gregory Pegg wrote that "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.
In an effort to find the few remaining heretics in and around the village of Montaillou, Jacques Fournier, Bishop of Pamiers, future Pope Benedict XII, had those suspected of heresy interrogated in the presence of scribes who recorded their conversations.
The late 13th- to early-14th-century document, the Fournier Register, discovered in the Vatican archives in the 1960s and edited by Jean Duvernoy, is the basis for Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's work Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error.
[11] Building on the work of French historians such as Monique Zerner and Uwe Brunn, Moore's The War on Heresy[124] argues that Catharism was "contrived from the resources of [the] well-stocked imaginations" of churchmen, "with occasional reinforcement from miscellaneous and independent manifestations of local anticlericalism or apostolic enthusiasm.
Instead, they were part of a broader ascetic or anti-materialist spiritual revival taking place in the later twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, which included Waldensians, Franciscans and Beguines.
Moore's work is indicative of a larger historiographical trend towards examining how heresy was constructed by the church[126] and kings: that "ambitious authoritarians" invented Catharism "in the service of a grand process of social centralization.
[129] Lucy Sackville has argued that while the revisionists rightly point to the Cathars' opaque origins and their branding as 'Manichaeans,' this does not mean we should disregard all evidence that their heresy had an organised theology.
[140] Hisel Berlin, advocating for the Baptist successionist theory, argued that claims about the Cathars were mainly false and that they denied things such as infant baptism.
