I knew you’d know!
The commander of the anti-Cathar crusade, when told that his soldiers were slaughtering both Cathars and Catholics, dismissed it with, “God will know which ones are his.”
The Cathars were more like Manichaeans, by way of the Bogomils of the Balkans. (What a name, Bogomil.)
““God will know which ones are his.””
Actually there is every reason to believe that is a myth.
Well, the quote is almost certainly apocryphal. But the legend caught on because the anti-Cathar crusade was so brutal.
The basic problem was that the Cathars were a death cult, holding that the greatest sanctifying act was to starve yourself to death. But death cults usually die out pretty quickly, right? Well, in the case of the Cathars they taught that supporting the “perfectoi” was also a means of “lesser” salvation. Thus, the German mercenaries were shocked at the fact that the apparently Catholic broader population supported the perfectoi militarily.
Thus, real or not, the quote reflected the fact that Crusade had turned from being a liberation of people from a death cult into a foreign invasion of one Catholic people by another.