The Cathars: The Most Successful Heresy of the Middle Ages

This book does what the title suggests It is a quick history of the Cathars ...especially those in France but also including those in Italy and some coverage of the Bogomils in Serbia. There is a rather brief review of the origins of dualist ideas in the Middle East and in the early Christian church. What is especially interesting to me is the way that a well established, and, seemingly, highly regarded religion could be exterminated ...more or less entirely. Pretty clearly one of the earlier examples of genocide ..and in this case largely at the behest of the catholic church. I have earlier read Montaillou: by Emmanuel Le Roy Laurie and this was pretty much a horror book about the atrocities incurred upon the poor, illiterate, show more inhabitants of a remote village in the Pyrenees by the Inquisition. It made quite an impression on me ...especially as I had travelled through this section of the Pyrenees a little bit earlier and could see what a hard life these people had.
The book delves a little into the origin of dualist ideas ...which probably pre-date Christianity ...and were certainly held by some of the earliest Christians. Interesting, in fact that they should have proven so tenacious but I guess they helped to explain how it was possible for there to be evil in the world.....which has been a constant challenge for Christian theologists to deal with....including Augustine of Hippo. After all, a good god who is omnipotent could scarcely be responsible for introducing evil into the world?
Pope Innocent initiated the crusade against the Cathars.....ironic that he should have adopted the name of "innocent" because it's hard to credit him with clean hands after the massacres and burnings of children and whole families of good people.
As a recipe for wiping out a religion the methodology was incredibly efficient:
1. Declare a holy crusade against the Cathars
2. The crusaders only have to "work" for 40 days anyway
3. They get to keep all the loot from the inhabitants they slaughter and their lands
5. Introduce an inquisition run by the likes of Bernard Gui.....who ensnare and entrap the illiterate and uneducated as well as the educated Cathars who are unable to lie. If a forebear is found to be heretical his bones are exhumed and the whole family is tainted.
It was a political war as well as a religious war and the French king was basically able to depose all the dukes and princes of Southern France and take over their lands.
I wonder what the economic cost of all this was? Obviously huge. The result was that France was more or less united and the petty wars between the counts of the south ...presumably reduced or eliminated. The religion was also unified and another potential source of conflict removed. The cost? Thousands killed, many barbarically by burning or other horrific measures involving torture. Cities destroyed. Crops destroyed...with starvation presumably following. Wholesale robbery and rape inflicted upon the south.
The Cathar beliefs frankly seem pretty harmless to me. And their way of life was regarded by all who came up against them (well nearly all) as "holier" than that of the catholics ...especially the priesthood. A good god who created the perfect world and an evil god (Satan) who created the world we inhabit. So everything of the world is necessarily evil....or to be abhorred...including marriage and procreation.
It's not a really detailed history of the Cathars but does what it purports to do. I give it 4 stars. show less

This is the best book on the Cathars I have read. It is about the religion and its history. Other books say they are about the Cathars but the books are just about the battles of the Albigensian Crusade and its politics. Other Cathar books are mystical new age books about secret eastern knowledge, the holy grail, the Knights Templar or Mary Magdalene. Other books say the Cathar belief were mysterious and sprang from nowhere. This book traces a straightforward chain from Paulicians, to Bogomils to the Cathars. It gives a transcript of a consolamentum, the "secret and mysterious" sacrament that is the core of the practice of Catharism. I guess it takes some of the romance out of the legends around Catharism but I like that it makes show more understanding it much easier.

The only hard part about the history in the book is that almost everyone involved is named Raymond. There is a Raymond V, Raymond VI, Raymond VII. There is a Raymond Roger Count of Foix. There is another Raymond Roger Trencavel. When people are not named Raymond, they are named Peter. Peter II, Peter of Bruys, Peter of Castelnau and Peter Roger of Mirepoix (another Roger). There were even women named Raymonde (with an e) who had affairs with guys named Peter. It is very hard to keep the players straight.

That being said, if you want to know what Catharism was, where it came from and what happened to it, this is the book to read. show less

This short book explains the origins of the Cathar movement of medieval Languedoc, Italy and the Balkans, placing it in the context of different theological approaches that had grown up in preceding centuries in both eastern and western European Christianity. Of course it also covers the appallingly violent - and, in some places and at some times near genocidal - and ultimately successful campaign by the Catholic Church and Inquisition to eliminate the Cathars both as a theological current within and opposed to the mainstream church, and to eliminate physically the Perfect, the Cathar equivalent to the priesthood, through mass burnings while giving others the opportunity to recant. The whole experience is a classic illustration of the show more vast gulf between the Medieval and modern mindset in assuming the measures that are appropriate in even a civilised society to decide which of two (or more) competing views of the world will prevail - a stark and somewhat depressing affirmation of the old adage that "the past is a different country, they do things differently there". show less

A good, and easy to read, introduction to the Cathar heresy and suppression by the French and Italian inquisitions.