Posted on 07/07/2007 6:54:08 AM PDT by Alex Murphy
It was the ruined citadel at Montsegur that got us hooked on the story of the Cathars, a breakaway group of Christians viciously persecuted by the Catholic Church in 12th and 13th century France. Perched on a craggy limestone peak, close to the Pyrenees, this fortress sheltered a group of Cathars besieged by Catholic crusaders for 10 months.
Eventually defeated, 220 men and women filed down a steep winding path to be burned en masse in an enclosure on the grassy meadow below the citadel in 1244. Burning was the French Inquisition's nifty way of recreating hell, a concept in which Cathars refused to believe. The execution was one of the final atrocities in a brutal, quite un-Christian, Catholic campaign that has been compared to the Nazis' persecution of the Jews.
Sitting inside Montsegur's ruined walls eight centuries on, it's hard to understand why a group of Christian semi-vegetarians (they ate fish but no meat) with anti-affluenza values so rattled the Catholic establishment.
But by the time the anti-Cathar crusade had finished its rampage of torching, eye-gouging and tearing out of tongues, about 500,000 people were dead - all because Catholicism felt threatened by Catharism's growing popularity among people of all classes who believed its philosophy of equality and austerity was a truer reflection of Christianity.
Given the epic ingredients of their story - sieges in bleak mountain refuges, inquisitions, a devout noblewoman flung into a well and stoned to death and horrific human pyres - you wonder why the Cathars' story has never seized popular imagination in the same way as Joan of Arc or the Jewish rebels besieged by Romans at Masada, for instance, or why Hollywood hasn't mined it for a medieval blockbuster.
Until the 2005 publication of Labyrinth, the best-selling historical thriller by British author Kate Mosse, featuring the Cathars' last stand at Montsegur, it's fair to say that the Cathars weren't well known outside Europe. The last known Cathar died at the stake in 1321.
They are remembered in their heartland, the Languedoc region of southern France, through the Cathar Trail: a series of sites linked to Cathar history that includes medieval villages, castles and citadels across an unspoiled landscape of rolling hills, vineyards, gorges and stark mountain peaks.
Getting to Montsegur took us about two hours by road from Toulouse, stopping for coffee in the shade of 13th-century buildings in the medieval town of Mirepoix, home of one of the Montsegur martyrs, a merchant called Pierre Robert. The climb to Montsegur's citadel takes about 30 minutes via a winding path, slippery in parts because of stones polished by so many feet toiling up the hill.
Walk out of the mid-summer heat into the ruins and the coolness of its interior hits you like a wall of water. Little remains except the shell of the mountain refuge, yet the place is strong on atmosphere and has a deep sense of isolation.
From Montsegur you can head east to what is considered the last Cathar stronghold, the castle of Queribus on a peak so awesomely bleak it makes Montsegur look cosy. The drive, through a Mediterranean landscape of villages, vineyards and forest to the Corbieres mountains north of Perpignan, is slow going because of the narrow winding roads.
The grey ruins of the castle, atop an inhospitable 700-metre peak, are so grafted on to the rock that it's hard to tell where one starts and the other ends. The climb is shorter than at Montsegur, about 15 minutes, but it's scarier because the rock is so sheer and exposed.
If great heights give you white knuckles, Queribus can be challenging and the visitors' pamphlet warns that it's dangerous in high winds and strictly off limits in storms. But once you're up there you'll be amazed by a view stretching to the Mediterranean coast and left wondering how on earth anyone managed to haul enough supplies up there to last out a siege, let alone erect a building. Yet 12 years after the burnings at Montsegur, a group of Cathars held out for a few weeks until Queribus fell in 1255.
Montsegur and Queribus fire the imagination and draw you so strongly to the past because their sense of history hasn't been diluted by over-manicuring and tourist tat. Car parks aside, they're probably not too different from the villages left by the Cathars, which is more than you can say for the better-known medieval city of Carcassonne, once besieged and looted in the anti-Cathar crusade, and a base for the Dominican Inquisition.
Seen from a distance, Le Cite, as the old part of the Carcassonne is called, is a vision of ancient ramparts and fairytale turrets that seems to float on the horizon like a mirage. It's one of the most beautifully preserved medieval sites in Europe, yet the tourist hordes and souvenir shops risk downgrading it to a theme park.
Aborting plans to stay there, we drove 30 kilometres south to Alet les-Bains, another medieval village and one-time home of Nostradamus, on the banks of the River Aude. Alongside the remains of a 12th-century abbey destroyed in the crusades against the Cathars, we found the idyllic and affordable Hostellerie de l'Eveche, a restored bishop's palace turned guest house on the river. A basic room cost about $80 for a double and the food was good and reasonably priced.
Carefully preserved but unimproved, Alet's maze of ancient streets are occupied not by souvenir shops but the homes of real families whose cooking smells drift from open windows and whose cats play on the quiet paths outside. It's the perfect antidote to overdone Carcassonne.
Destination Languedoc, France
GETTING THERE
A good way to follow the Cathar Trail is by car, starting from Toulouse or Carcassonne. The latter didn't get our vote as the best place to visit but it's a good jumping-off point if you're travelling via Britain. Ryanair has cheap flights twice daily from London (Stansted Airport) to Carcassonne. Car hire is available from Carcassonne Airport.
Air France flies a Sydney-Paris-Toulouse return for about $2420.
There are dozens of interesting places with Cathar connections in southern France, including Toulouse, which was repeatedly besieged; Beziers, where crusaders hunting for Cathars massacred 7000 people in 1209; and Albi, where the Inquisition led interrogations and put Cathars on trial.
See http://www.languedoc-france.info, which also lists the names of Cathar men and women martyred at Montsegur.
STAYING THERE
Hostellerie de l'Eveche, Alet-les-Bains, http://www.hotel-eveche.com.
WHAT TO TAKE
Kate Mosse's gripping novel Labyrinth (Orion) to read on the road. The plot, which slips between the present and the 13th century, will bring the landscape and ruined citadels to life. For a non-fiction account of the political and historical intrigues surrounding the Cathar purge, read the recently published Secrets of the Labyrinth (Orion), by Mosse's writer-researcher husband, Greg.
ping to read later
obvious anti-catholic tone of the article and claim of 500,000 dead has my bs detector beeping.
google brought up this interesting website.
http://www.russianbooks.org/montsegur/montsegur2.htm
This is a little bit of a whitewash of the Albigensians, isn’t it?
Catholic historian, Lord Acton, said this bloodbath in the southern French region of Languedoc was where "religious assassination became Church policy" and "murder was made a legal basis of the Christian Church."
I guess Monty Python was right. "Nobody expects the Inquisition..."
Then again, some of us might.
"NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition! Amongst our weaponry are such diverse elements as: fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency, an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope, and nice red uniforms..."
Here's another interesting take on this deplorable history of slaughter that sounds more like Rwanda than Christianity...
"...This was the first time the crusade concept had been used against dissidents who called themselves Christian. "For twenty long years Languedoc and Provence in France were subjected to a blood bath which not only wiped out the most advanced culture of the time but introduced into the Church, and from there throughout the West, the rule that any ideological deviation must be crushed by force." -- The Waldensian Movement From Waldo to the Reformation, II, Growth and Reaction.
The more things change...
describing Lord Acton as a “catholic” historian is shaky.
He had an uneasy relationship with the Church.
Everyone has bias -and article with the op reeks of it.
I’m not saying a terrible thing was NOT committed against this religious group.
I just think the likely truth is the situation is much more complicated than the author presents.
I also suspect exaggeration and embellishment.
On 8 September 1572 a procession of thanksgiving took place in Rome, and the pope, in a prayer after mass, thanked God for having "granted the Catholic people a glorious triumph over a perfidious race" (gloriosam de perfidis gentibus populo catholico loetitiam tribuisti)..."When the first rumours of the massacre reached the Vatican in Rome on 2 September 1572, pope Gregory XIII was jubilant and wanted bonfires to be lit in Rome. He was persuaded to wait for the official communication. The very morning of the day that he received the confirmed news, the pope held a consistory and announced that "God had been pleased to be merciful". Then with all the cardinals he repaired to the Church of St. Mark for the Te Deum, and prayed and ordered prayers that the Most Christian King might rid and purge his entire kingdom (of France) of the Huguenot plague.
And yet some tell us we're overly-sensitive.
It is probably not a coincidence that the south of France was also the most fertile part of the country to the message of the Reformation. I believe that some small pockets of descendents of Reformed Christians are still there.
Amen.
As a reformed Christian, I don't believe in coincidences.
But I do like what Ian Fleming said about them...
"Once is coincidence; twice is happenstance; three times is enemy action."
As an aside, Fleming wrote that James Bond's mother was a French Huguenot and his father was a Scottish Presbyterian who gave his son a Calvinist education.
Coincidence? 8~)
And the second glossed over point is that while they were ascetic gnostics, they weren't above violence. This is not about some pacifistic Protestants being persecuted, this is about people doing what they did in a very sadistic and bloody time when the punishment for treason was to be castrated and gutted while still alive and then quartered by horses tied to each limb and whipped to a frenzy.
To make this out as a specifically and uniquely Catholic kind of viciousness is not unexpected but it's not realistic either. It's taken a long time to get to the point where Europeans favor killing only the young and helpless or the old and helpless, while they loathe punishing murderers and traitors in the prime of life.
As an Evangelical(Arminian), I couldn’t agree with you more on the issue of coincidences. What the secularists and other non-believers interpret as a coincidence is very often the working of the Holy Spirit.
"For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure." -- Philippians 2:13
What a coincidence that you bring up Ian Fleming and 007 on this day of all days: 7-07-07????
Not to excuse the Catholic Church here, but I would be careful before you claim the “Cathars” as reformed Christians. They were closer to Gnostics.
Well, I don’t think you want to start bringing up all the attacks from BOTH sides during the wars of religion. Cause there are just as many Protestant attacks as Catholic ones. A sad state of affairs certainly, but both sides can hurl abuse and bring up attacks just as easily as the other one.
"It is exceedingly difficult to form any very precise idea of the Albigensian doctrines because present knowledge of them is derived from their opponents and from the very rare and uninformative Albigensian texts which have come down to us. What is certain is that, above all, they formed an antisacerdotal party in permanent opposition to the Roman church and raised a continued protest against the corruption of the clergy of their time...." [Copyright © 1994-2000 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., Albigenses]
If you want to claim them, you can. I just would caution you against it.
The Crusade was launched against them, not for any theological faults, but because they were critical of the Church of Rome.
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