Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius.
Translation: “Kill them all. The Lord will know His own.”
Variation: “Kill them all. Let God sort them out.”
Supposed statement by Abbot Arnold Amaury before the massacre of Béziers during the Albigensian Crusade,
I read years ago that the Paulicians started when some Greek in Asia, who knew only the gospels got hold of some of Paul’s letters and went wild with them.
One of the first villages, in the Holy Land, destroyed in the First Crusade was not moslem but Paulician.
The Paulicians rejected marriage but same sex was OK, so the word Buggary described Bulgarian Paulicians.
If I am in error on this I’m sure someone will be along to straighten me out. That is what I like about FR.
As for Crusades, why go to Palestine and fight moslems when you can go a few miles and fight Cathars? Reward for the Crusade was the same!
You do know that the quote is a fiction, right?
Yet the reason for the fiction is that the ferocity of the war shocked Albi and Christian alike. Summoning Germans and Spaniards to squash a French heresy was well, short-sighted.
I’m not sure your characterization of the Paulicians is fair. The main problem is the influence of the Manicheans, a pagan cult which held that YHWH was an evil, lesser god who had rebelled against Lucifer by creating the physical world. (Is it fair to call that Satanism?) The Manicheans figured man wasn’t up to avoiding carnal pleasures, so they tolerated recreational sex... just as long as you didn’t procreate. So, yes, sodomy tended to replace procreative sex among the Manicheans. This also possibly accounts for the accumulation of wealth, akin to the way San Francisco and Philadelphia prefer gays to families.
The Manicheans were hardly about free thought! Their disciples frequently starved themselves to death, they became so fearful of “carnality.” My guess is was emotional illness: they got anally raped enough, regarded it, of course, as a negative and profoundly evil experience, then got told that it was spiritually harmful, but no worse than eating. That can kind of mess with someone’s mind.
And probably explains why some of the French were pleading to Rome for a crusade.