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.
Or maybe because of the theological fault AND they represented a threat to Rome. Just a possibility that the religious reasons stated for the Crusade were actually genuine.
***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.****
Wasn’t their doctrines similar to the Paulicians and Bogomills?
Strange their was no mention of the Cathar doctrines in this article.
It's more than a little ridiculous to be all scholarly and responsible about the unknowability of Cathar thought and then, minutes later, to pretend to knowledge of all the whys and wherefores of the Catholic response.
But its fun that way, but I sadly think all sides are guilty of a little of that.
I TRY to save my "float like a lead balloon, sting like a down duvet" rhetoric for the secular fights. I TRY. I do not succeed.
LOL, same here. I try to stay out of most of them, but I know I can be bad when I find myself getting suckered in. Character deficiency.
“A sad state of affairs certainly, but both sides can hurl abuse and bring up attacks just as easily as the other one.”
well sure...no one can claim innocense!
It was a brutal, violent time.
And what was the rest of europe doing? singing kum-bay-ah?
Were there times that protestants committed “unchristian” acts of violence against each other? against catholics? against others? As I recall there was a heckuva alot of burning and drowning of suspected witches - it continued when they traveled to America.
Meanwhile the orthodox Serbs and catholic Croats were beginning their centuries long bloodshed -while throwing the Turks in to boot.
But what the heck!
Let’s ONLY focus on catholic violence - and then multiply the deaths by what factor?
Did Lancet come up with that figure of 500,000?
Does anyone know if there even were 500,000 Cathars in total?
So in the end what we have is more cherry picking of facts.
There really isn’t an interest here to expore the incident in entirety and search for accuracy, because the point is to bash catholics.
Meanwhile, today in the year 2007 we have a very real threat to our well-being - a common enemy who wishes to kill all of us - catholic, protestant, atheist - you name it.
But no - let’s dig into the past, embellish one side of the story, so we can keep taking digs at each other.
I had forgotten about the horrible Catholic v. Orthodox violence as well. Thanks for reminding me, though it is certainly a subject that while it bears remembering, more so as a lesson, as opposed to a tool to bludgeon those we disagree with.
I visited that part of europe a few years back.
I was a guest of Croation catholics.
so of course - when they shared their version of the conflict with the Serbs - it all sounded very horrifying and one sided. We got the scoop on the Turks too.
I was fascinated with the depth of history there, but didn’t have a clue as to the facts.
When I got home I started doing reading. The more I read the more complicated the story - the more twists and turns - genocide, atrocities, unimaginable acts committed by all of them.
They all were guilty. Whenever they got the chance they sought revenge on the others. A long unending cycle of grudges -revenge - and bloodshed.
so...it took that experience to teach me that when you hear about “history” from a source, and it appears to give the message “us good - them bad” - you can bet there’s much more to the story than is being told.
My hosts didn’t really lie to me.
In the last cycle of violence the Serbs committed terrible atrocities against the Croats.
My hosts just didn’t wish to talk about what they did to the Serbs before that. They omitted quite alot.
the Catholic response
lol. How polite. Slaughter is a "response" now.
Cool. How’d I miss that one? 8~)
I wasn’t claiming that the Cathars were early Reformed Christians. What they did have in common was opposition to the dominant religion. I know little of their doctrines, but suspect that you are correct in claiming “ They were closer to Gnostics”.
This was the time when Mary gave us the rosary. After a hundred years of the spread of the cathar rebellion, a catholic priest prayed for help to stop the Albignesian heresy. He saw no future for Christianity and was about to give up when he had a vision of what to say to his congregation. He prayed the first rosary in his church and it lead to the eventual elimination of an ideology that could have quashed Christianity.
A key belief in Manichaeism is that there is no omnipotent good power. This claim addresses a theoretical part of the problem of evil by denying the infinite perfection of God and postulating the two equal and opposite powers mentioned previously. The human person is seen as a battleground for these powers: the good part is the soul (which is composed of light) and the bad part is the body (composed of dark earth). The soul defines the person and is incorruptible, but it is under the domination of a foreign power, which addressed the practical part of The Problem of Evil. Humans are said to be able to be saved from this power (matter) if they come to know who they are and identify themselves with their soul.
Manicheanism is a persian dualistic religion - not Christianity in any form. Ignorant authors and succulent readers should know better.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manichaeism
Should all "heretics" be killed in the name of God?
There are approximately 4-5 billion non Christians on earth. Certainly a great many of these peoples beliefs and practices are dangerous to Christianity. Should we kill them all and let Gord sort it out?
I do find it interesting that you would use probably the most unreliable "Encyclopedic" resource on the internet as the source of your apparent self-professed knowledge.
IOW, what is your point?
In all seriositude, you got a source you'd recommend for an account of this period and the Albigensians? I have heard that they were kind of rough on my guy, St. Dominic, and on Bishop Diego. But I sure don't want to get into a, "Mommy, he started it," discussion.
I'm kind of glad we don't massacre heretics anymore. It's way more fun to bore them to death.
No, that is an absurd statement. Protestants never created an organization within the church to act as storm troopers whose sole mission was to exterminate other religions.
As you know, the church in Rome did just that.
The Reformation was fought with faith and Scripture. The counter-Reformation was fought with blood and deception.
Blood? If you want to talk blood, we can talk about the martyrs that were killed by Protestants.
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