Albigenses

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The Albigenses are the dualist dissenters of southern France against whom the papacy launched a crusade in the early thirteenth century — the regional name for the movement more broadly called Cathar. The word comes from the town of Albi, in the county of Toulouse; outsiders, writing of heresy in the Languedoc, took one place and made it stand for a whole country’s deviation. As with “Cathar,” the label was fixed from the outside, by the churchmen and chroniclers who recorded the people they were condemning.

What made the Languedoc the setting was less a single doctrine than a society that tolerated one. The lands between the Rhône and the Garonne were governed by a patchwork of counts and viscounts — Toulouse, Béziers, Carcassonne, Foix — loosely bound to a distant French crown, prosperous on trade and possessed of a courtly culture in the language of the troubadours. Dissenting preachers moved through its towns with the protection, or at least the indifference, of the local nobility, and the regular church there was widely held to be weak and worldly. To Rome the result looked like a province slipping its grip. Bernard of Clairvaux had preached against the heresy in the region as early as the 1140s, to little effect; decades of legates and disputations followed without dislodging it.

The crusade itself was a sequence of events more than a war of belief, and its episodes are well attested. It was proclaimed in 1209, after the murder in 1208 of the papal legate Pierre de Castelnau, an act blamed on the count of Toulouse. The army that marched south took Béziers that summer and put much of its population to death — the slaughter to which a later chronicler, Caesarius of Heisterbach, attached the line “kill them all, God will know his own,” whether or not it was ever spoken. Carcassonne fell soon after. Command of the campaign passed to the northern baron Simon de Montfort, who fought through the next years to hold and extend what had been seized, and was killed besieging Toulouse in 1218. The fighting dragged on under his son and then under the French king directly, until the Treaty of Paris in 1229 ended it on terms that folded the county of Toulouse toward the crown.

The lasting consequences were political and institutional rather than doctrinal. The independent south was broken and absorbed into the kingdom of France, a shift in the map of medieval Europe that outlived any question of heresy. And because the sword had not reached belief, the papacy turned to interrogation: the inquisitorial tribunals established in the region in the following decade pursued surviving believers household by household for generations. Historians note that nearly everything recorded of what the Albigenses actually held comes through those proceedings — which is also why the modern argument over whether they formed a coherent church, or were assembled into one by their accusers, turns on the same documents. The crusade left the question it was meant to settle harder to answer than before.

→ Related: Catharism · Adamites · Middle Ages · Bernard Of Clairvaux