Catharism

• 1. The Name They Never Used

  ›

  The people now called Cathars did not use that name in the testimony recorded by the Inquisition. Catharism, the Christian movement that thrived in northern Italy and southern France between the 12th and 14th centuries, takes its label from a Greek word meaning the pure ones. Catholic theologians coined it, and inquisitors used it almost exclusively. In their own texts, the followers called themselves Good Men, Good Women or Good Christians.

  A pamphlet of 1430, the Errores Gazariorum, shows how far the label could drift from the people it described. Its full English title is The errors of the Gazarri, or of those who travel riding a broom or a stick.

  Thousands of these Good Christians were slaughtered, hanged or burned, and by 1350 the movement was gone. Most of its writings were destroyed as well, so the record comes largely from its enemies. That leaves open questions this documentary follows. What did the Good Christians believe about God, the body and Jesus? Who led them, and where did women fit? Why did the Church answer with armies and then with courts? And did an organised Cathar religion exist at all, or did churchmen help to invent it?

  1567986

• 2. Two Gods

  ›

  In the Cathar view, the world had two creators rather than one. The good God ruled the spiritual realm and was the God of the New Testament. An evil god governed the physical world. Many Cathars named him Satan and identified him with the God of the Old Testament. Gnostic tradition called such a lesser creator the demiurge, often titled Rex Mundi, meaning King of the World.

  Cathar communities disagreed about how evenly matched the two powers were. Some held a mitigated dualism, like their Bogomil predecessors, in which Satan had once served the true God before rebelling. Others, probably a majority as time passed, held an absolute dualism in which the two gods were twins of equal power and importance. The Book of the Two Principles argues this dualist theology. It is the one large Cathar text that survives, and it was possibly written by the Italian Cathar John Lugio of Bergamo.

  Rex Mundi made all visible matter, including the human body, so matter itself was tainted with sin. Humans, in this telling, were angels seduced by Satan before the War in Heaven against the army of Michael. They were then forced to remain in the evil god's material realm. Regaining angelic status demanded a complete renunciation of the material self. Until a person managed that, they faced an endless round of human lives on a corrupt Earth. Zoé Oldenbourg compared the Cathars to Western Buddhists, because she saw their view of resurrection as close to the Buddhist idea of rebirth.

  Jesus Christ was venerated, yet the Cathars denied that he had a physical incarnation or a Resurrection. Authors compare their view to Docetism, in which Jesus was the human form of an angel and his body only an appearance. They read the Resurrection as a symbol of reincarnation. The cross, to them, was merely a material instrument of torture and evil. John the Baptist, whom they identified with the prophet Elijah, they saw as an evil being sent to hinder Jesus's teaching through the false sacrament of baptism.

  The thirteenth-century chronicler Pierre des Vaux-de-Cernay recorded a stranger version held by some communities. In it, the good God had made a spirit realm called the Land of the Living, and the story of Jesus happened there. The Jesus of the physical world was a false messiah and a lustful lover of Mary Magdalene. The true Jesus reached the physical world only by inhabiting the body of Paul.

  Besides the New Testament, the alleged sacred texts included the Bogomil Gospel of the Secret Supper, also called John's Interrogation, and a modified Ascension of Isaiah. The Cathars regarded the Old Testament as the work of Satan, apart from a few books they accepted. They read the Book of Revelation as an allegorical chronicle of Satan's rebellion rather than a prophecy. Escaping the cycle of rebirth, in their teaching, hinged on a single rite.

  1922972338

• 3. Perfect and Believer

  ›

  The Consolamentum, also called the Consolation, was the one central rite of Cathar practice. A short ceremony removed all sin from the believer and raised him to the rank of Perfect. Many believers waited until death approached. The heavy purity required of a Perfect would then have to be kept only briefly.

  Some who received the rite on a deathbed may then have refused all food except cold water until they died. This has been called the endura. Certain Church writers claimed that a Cathar who began to recover after the rite was smothered to guarantee entry to paradise. Little evidence suggests this was common beyond extreme cases.

  The inquisitor Bernard Gui recorded how Cathars dismissed the Church's sacraments. On the Eucharist, he reported that they said it could not hold the body of Christ. Had the host been as large as the biggest mountain, they argued, Christians would have eaten all of it long ago. The wafer began as straw, they said, was sifted through horsehair, and met a vile end in the body, which no God could suffer.

  Of baptism, Gui reported, they held that water was material and corruptible and so the creation of the evil power. Churchmen sold it out of avarice, just as they sold earth for burying the dead, oil for anointing the sick and the hearing of confession.

  In the Languedoc, the Cathar Church may have had a fairly flat structure. It distinguished the baptised Perfecti, who called themselves bonhommes, from ordinary unbaptised believers called credentes. By about 1140, a liturgy and a system of doctrine were in place. The first bishopric was created at Albi around 1165.

  A council held at Saint-Félix-Lauragais in 1167 drew many local figures. Also present were the Bogomil papa Nicetas, the Cathar bishop of northern France and a leader of the Cathars of Lombardy. Bishoprics followed at Toulouse, Carcassonne and Agen, making four by 1200. Around 1225, a fifth was added at Razès.

  Each bishop had two assistants. One was a filius maior, typically his successor, and the other a filius minor. Deacons helped them in turn. The Perfecti were the spiritual elite, respected by many locals for lives of austerity and charity. In the apostolic fashion, they ministered to the people and travelled in pairs. Among those able to administer the Consolamentum were women.

  3019516138

• 4. Women and Equality

  ›

  Catharism has been seen as offering women the greatest chance for independent action in its time. Women could be believers, and they could also be Perfects who administered the consolamentum. The Cathars held the spirit to be immaterial and sexless, and a person might be reborn as a man or a woman. For that reason they saw women as equally capable of spiritual leadership.

  Mary Magdalene carried more weight for the Cathars than she had for the Church before them. Her role as a teacher supported the idea of women as leaders. Out of reverence for the Gospel of John, they saw her as perhaps even more important than Saint Peter, the founder of the Church.

  Many women joined the Perfects, numerous of them receiving the consolamentum after being widowed. Female Perfects had to follow a strict, ascetic life but could keep their own houses. Not every woman was won over. In 1163, Hildegard of Bingen gave a rousing exhortation against the Cathars in Cologne. She announced God's eternal damnation on all who accepted their beliefs.

  Women Perfects rarely travelled to preach, and only isolated cases of leaving home to spread the faith are known. Their vital work was founding group homes, called ostals. There, women were educated in the faith, and the children they bore became believers in turn. The faith grew with each passing generation through this pattern.

  The equality had limits. Later French Cathars taught that a person's last incarnation had to be as a man to break the cycle, so women had to be reborn as men to be saved. Toward the end of the movement, women Perfects were increasingly excluded. The trend stayed limited, and Italian Perfects still included women.

  5392195174

• 5. Rules of Living

  ›

  Killing was abhorrent to the Cathars, and the Perfecti avoided all animal food, sometimes excepting fish. They believed fish were produced by spontaneous generation. Cheese, eggs, meat and milk were refused as by-products of sexual intercourse. Animals, in their view, carried reincarnated souls.

  War and capital punishment were condemned, which was unusual in medieval Europe. Yet the sect had armed men ready to fight, and even kill, on its behalf.

  Reproduction counted as a moral evil because it prolonged the chain of reincarnation and suffering in the material world. A heresy charge against a suspected Cathar was usually dismissed if he could prove he was legally married. The Cathars also believed that the sexual allure of women hindered a man's ability to reject the material world. Some communities made exceptions. In one version, the Invisible Father had two spiritual wives, Collam and Hoolibam. Cathars who followed that story believed that having a family would not bar them from God's kingdom.

  The Cathars drew from the Old Testament a doctrine with implicit antisemitism, yet they showed little hostility to Jews as an ethnic group. Jews probably held a higher status in Cathar territories than elsewhere in Europe. Cathars appointed Jews as bailiffs and to other public offices, which further angered the Catholic Church.

  By 1207, many towns in Provence and its vicinity were almost completely populated by Cathars. Bishop Fulk of Toulouse, a key leader of the persecutions, scolded the Languedoc knights for not hunting the heretics harder. He received the reply: "We cannot. We have been reared in their midst. We have relatives among them and we see them living lives of perfection."

  1951857461

• 6. The Albigensian Crusade

  ›

  In 1147, Pope Eugene III sent a legate to the Cathar district to halt the movement's progress. Bernard of Clairvaux won a few isolated successes, but the mission's poor results showed how strong the sect was in the Languedoc. Later efforts did no better. Cardinal Peter of Saint Chrysogonus went to Toulouse in 1178, and Henry of Marcy, cardinal-bishop of Albano, followed in 1180-81. Both won only momentary gains. Henry's armed expedition took the stronghold at Lavaur without extinguishing the movement. The Council of Tours in 1163 and the Third Council of the Lateran in 1179 had scarcely more effect.

  When Innocent III became pope in 1198, he was determined to deal with the Cathars. He began with peaceful conversion and sent legates south. They had to contend with the Cathars, the nobles who protected them and the people who respected them. Many local bishops also resented the authority the Pope had given the legates. In 1204, Innocent suspended a number of bishops in Occitania. In 1205, he appointed a new and vigorous bishop of Toulouse, the former troubadour Foulques.

  In 1206, Diego of Osma and his canon, the future Saint Dominic, began a conversion programme in Languedoc. Public debates between Catholics and Cathars were held at Verfeil, Servian, Pamiers, Montréal and elsewhere. Dominic concluded that only preachers of real sanctity, humility and asceticism could win over convinced Cathars. The institutional Church, as a rule, lacked those qualities. His rebuke was: "Zeal must be met by zeal, humility by humility, false sanctity by real sanctity, preaching falsehood by preaching truth." That conviction eventually led to the founding of the Dominican Order in 1216. Even Dominic won only a few converts.

  In January 1208, the papal legate Pierre de Castelnau, a Cistercian monk, theologian and canon lawyer, went to meet Raymond VI, Count of Toulouse. Castelnau was known for excommunicating nobles who protected the Cathars. He excommunicated Raymond after an allegedly fierce argument in which the count supposedly threatened him with violence. Shortly afterwards, Castelnau was murdered while returning to Rome, allegedly by a knight in Raymond's service. His body was returned and laid to rest in the Abbey of Saint-Gilles.

  The Pope declared Castelnau a martyr, ordered his legates to preach a crusade, and wrote to Philip Augustus, King of France. He asked the king, or the king's son Louis, to intervene. Some historians see the murder as a turning point, since papal policy had until then avoided military force. Raymond was excommunicated for a second time in 1209.

  Philip II refused to lead the crusade and could not spare Prince Louis, because Flanders, the empire and the threat of an Angevin revival still pressed him. He did allow some barons to join, notably Simon de Montfort and Bouchard de Marly. The roughly twenty years of war that followed took their name from Albi. That city was the capital of the Albigensian district, which matches the present-day French department of Tarn. It also gave the Cathars their other name, Albigensians.

  A papal decree allowing the seizure of lands owned by Cathars and their supporters helped to fuel northern enthusiasm for the war. The decree angered the lords of the south. It also angered Philip II, who was at least nominally overlord of the men whose land was now open to seizure. He wrote to Innocent in strong terms, but the Pope refused to change it. For northern noblemen looking for new fiefs, a Languedoc said to teem with Cathars and sympathisers became an inviting target.

  The first major engagement came at Béziers, besieged on the 22nd of July 1209. The crusader army stood under the command, spiritual and military, of the papal legate Arnaud Amalric, Abbot of Cîteaux. The Catholic inhabitants were offered freedom to leave unharmed, but many refused and stayed to fight beside the Cathars. A sortie by the defenders was quickly beaten, and the crusaders chased them back through the gates. Amalric later wrote to Innocent that his soldiers had acted on their own initiative during negotiations, without waiting for orders.

  The doors of the church of St Mary Magdalene were broken down, and the refugees inside were dragged out and slaughtered. Reports put the dead there at no fewer than 7,000 men, women and children, though some scholars dispute the number. Elsewhere in the town, many thousands more were mutilated and killed. Prisoners were blinded, dragged behind horses and used for target practice. Fire razed what remained of the city.

  Amalric told the Pope: "Today your Holiness, twenty thousand heretics were put to the sword, regardless of rank, age, or sex." Béziers had a permanent population of between 10,000 and 14,500. Refugees sheltering inside the walls could conceivably have raised the number to 20,000, and scholars dispute the figure, some reading it as figurative. A report written thirty years later by someone who was not present claims that Amalric was asked how to tell Cathars from Catholics. Caesarius of Heisterbach, a fellow Cistercian, gave his alleged reply as "Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius", meaning "Kill them all, the Lord will recognise His own".

  Carcassonne, the capital of the powerful Trencavel lords, fell next. The Trencavels also held Béziers, Albi and the Razes. Little was done to form a regional coalition against the crusaders. They took the city and imprisoned Raymond Roger Trencavel in his own citadel, where he died within three months. Champions of the Occitan cause claimed he was murdered.

  Simon de Montfort, designated leader of the crusader army after Carcassonne, received the Trencavel lands from Innocent. That earned him the enmity of Peter II of Aragon, who had stayed aloof from the conflict and had even mediated during the siege of Carcassonne. Holding his gains through the winters then tested de Montfort. From his main winter camp at Fanjeaux, he led a small force of confederates, and local lords who had sworn loyalty out of necessity deserted him. Reinforcements from northern France, Germany and elsewhere swelled his army. His summer campaigns won back what winter lost, and he pushed on to St. Antonin in the Aveyron and Beaucaire on the Rhône.

  His greatest triumph came at the Battle of Muret in 1213. His much smaller force, made up entirely of cavalry, decisively beat the combined armies of Raymond of Toulouse, his Occitan allies and Peter II of Aragon. By some estimates those armies were five to ten times larger. Peter died there on the 12th of September 1213, which effectively ended the ambitions of the house of Aragon and Barcelona in the Languedoc. De Montfort himself was killed on the 25th of June 1218, after besieging Toulouse for nine months.

  Philip II's victory at Bouvines near Lille in 1214 ended the Anglo-French War of 1213-1214 and dealt a death blow to the Angevin Empire. It was won against an Anglo-German force trying to undermine the French crown, and an opposite result would have been a serious setback to the crusade. The victory freed Philip to give the south more attention, though full royal intervention came only in early 1226, when Louis VIII led a substantial force into southeastern France. In 1215, bishops had meanwhile met at the Fourth Council of the Lateran under Innocent III, with the Cathar heresy on the agenda.

  The Treaty of Paris in 1229 ended the official war. The king of France dispossessed the House of Toulouse of most of its fiefs and the Trencavels of all of theirs, which ended the independence of the Languedoc princes. The Cathars were not yet extinguished, however. A different kind of pursuit was about to begin, carried out by courts rather than armies.

  987939483

• 7. The Inquisition's Reach

  ›

  On Friday the 13th of May 1239, in Champagne, 183 men and women convicted of Catharism were burned at the stake. The order came from the Dominican inquisitor Robert le Bougre, himself a former Cathar Perfect. The Inquisition, established in 1233 to root out the remaining Cathars, worked at Toulouse, Albi, Carcassonne and other southern towns through the 13th century and much of the 14th. Those who refused to recant, or who relapsed, were hanged or burnt. The Council of Narbonne in 1235 had set lesser punishments for laymen suspected of sympathy with the Cathars.

  The fortress of Montségur was besieged from May 1243 to March 1244 by troops of the seneschal of Carcassonne and the archbishop of Narbonne. On the 16th of March 1244, more than 200 Cathar Perfects were burnt on an enormous pyre at the foot of the castle. The place is still known as the prat dels cremats, the field of the burned.

  A popular belief, so far unsubstantiated, holds that a small party of Perfects slipped out of Montségur before the burning. People in the Cathar region still say they carried away the Cathar treasure. Nobody agrees on what it was. Guesses range from sacred Gnostic texts to the Cathars' accumulated wealth, which might have included the Holy Grail.

  Later insurrections rose in the early 14th century under Roger-Bernard II, Count of Foix, Aimery III of Narbonne and the Franciscan friar Bernard Délicieux. Délicieux was later prosecuted for adhering to another heretical movement, the Spiritual Franciscans. By then, deserted by the nobles of their districts, the Cathars had become scattered fugitives who met in secret in forests and mountain wilds. The Inquisition had grown very powerful, and many presumed Cathars were summoned before it.

  The registers of the inquisitors Bernard of Caux, Jean de St Pierre, Geoffroy d'Ablis and others hold precise records of this. The Perfects, it was said, only rarely recanted, and hundreds were burnt. Repentant lay believers were punished but spared as long as they did not relapse. Having recanted, they had to sew yellow crosses onto their outdoor clothing and live apart from other Catholics, at least for a time.

  In April 1310, Peire Autier, leader of a Cathar revival in the Pyrenean foothills, was captured and executed in Toulouse. In the autumn of 1321, Guillaume Bélibaste, the last known Cathar perfect in the Languedoc, was executed. After 1330, Inquisition records contain very few proceedings against Cathars. In the Languedoc the movement had lingered in much reduced form until around 1325, and in the Italian cities until the Inquisitions of the 14th century. Decades of harassment and re-proselytising left the sect exhausted, with no new adherents to be found.

  The Waldensians and the pantheistic Brethren of the Free Spirit, persecuted in the same area, survived in remote places in small numbers through the 14th and 15th centuries. The Waldensian movement continues today. Its ideas influenced other proto-Protestant groups, such as the Hussites, the Lollards and the Moravian Church.

  803054441

• 8. Real or Imagined

  ›

  The first confirmed report of a group with Cathar-like beliefs dates to 1143, when the cleric Eberwin of Steinfeld described one active at Cologne. Most scholars now agree that identifiable historical Catharism did not emerge before then. It sprang up in the Rhineland cities, especially Cologne, in the mid-12th century, and in northern France around the same time. It reached the Languedoc and the northern Italian cities in the mid-to-late 12th century, and in those two regions it gained its greatest popularity.

  The origins of Cathar belief are unclear. Most theories point to the Byzantine Empire, with ideas travelling along trade routes from the First Bulgarian Empire as far as the Netherlands. The Bogomils of Thrace, whose name means Friends of God, strongly influenced the movement. Paulicians from Armenia and eastern Anatolia who were resettled in Thrace may also have played a part. The French word Bougres, from Bulgarians, was applied to the Albigensians. Mark Pegg and others warn that similarities seen by modern scholars do not prove direct historical links.

  Since the 1990s, historians such as R. I. Moore have challenged how far Catharism existed as an institutionalised religion. In The War on Heresy, Moore argues that it was "contrived from the resources of the well-stocked imaginations" of churchmen. The people persecuted, he claims, were part of a broader spiritual revival in the later twelfth and early thirteenth centuries rather than followers of a secret religion imported from the East. Scholars have called the fearful rumours of Cathars a moral panic, and compared the crusade against them to European witch-hunts, antisemitic persecution and the Satanic Panic.

  In 2016, Cathars in Question, edited by Antonio Sennis, gathered conflicting views from academics who had met in London in April 2013 at University College London and the Warburg Institute. Sennis calls the existence of a phenomenon that can legitimately be called Catharism highly controversial and hotly debated. Andrew Roach, reviewing the volume in The English Historical Review, saw reconciliation as still some distance away among its distinguished, if sometimes cantankerous, contributors.

  Claire Taylor argues that the question matters at an ethical level. Denying the existence of the persecuted group, she says, wrongs thousands of people who were prepared to suffer extreme persecution and an agonising death for a dissident religious doctrine. She has called for a post-revisionism in the debate. Rebecca Rist agrees that the medieval Church exaggerated the threat but sees evidence that the heresy existed. Lucy Sackville accepts that the origins were opaque, yet argues that this does not erase evidence of an organised theology. Many who were offered the chance to recant went willingly to the flames, which is hard to explain without some real conviction.

  One rare window into the persecuted comes from the Fournier Register. Jacques Fournier, Bishop of Pamiers and a future Pope Benedict XII, had suspects from the village of Montaillou interrogated before scribes who recorded their words. The document, from the late 13th to early 14th century, was discovered in the Vatican archives in the 1960s and edited by Jean Duvernoy. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie built his book Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error on it.

  Other eras reshaped the Cathars to fit their own causes. The 16th-century Protestant John Foxe argued that they held proto-Protestant theology, and Jean Duvernoy made a similar case in the 20th century. Many historians criticised them, partly because the dualism of the Cathars is absent from Protestantism. Twentieth-century Baptists such as James Milton Carroll, in The Trail of Blood, treated the Cathars as forerunners of Baptist theology. Academic Baptist historians have since moved toward seeing Baptists as an outgrowth of 17th-century English Separatism.

  In the 1930s, the young German Otto Rahn, later an SS officer, published Crusade Against the Grail. He rekindled interest in a link between the Cathars and the Holy Grail, especially in Germany, and was convinced that Wolfram von Eschenbach's 13th-century work Parzival was a veiled account of the Cathars. The Nazi official Alfred Rosenberg spoke favourably of them in The Myth of the Twentieth Century. Popular culture has also linked the Cathars to the Knights Templar, as in the pseudohistorical The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. Academic books in English on the Cathars appeared only at the start of the 21st century, among them works by Malcolm Lambert and Malcolm Barber.

  The poems and songs of the Cathar troubadours form the movement's principal artistic legacy, though they are only a small part of the wider Occitan heritage. The Occitan song Lo Boièr is particularly associated with Catharism. Thomas Binkley, the electric hurdy-gurdy artist Valentin Clastrier, La Nef and Jordi Savall have all made recordings that explore the Cathar element in troubadour art.

  After the suppression, descendants of the Cathars faced discrimination and were at times required to live outside towns and their defences. Today, the word Cathar applied to anyone after the 14th century is a cultural or ancestral reference with no religious meaning. The French name Pays cathare, meaning Cathar Country, marks the region where the movement was strongest, and the département of the Aude uses it in tourist brochures. Ruins from the wars against the Cathars around Montségur and Carcassonne can still be visited.

  6793878678