Yes. 1208. Pardon me... the 'c.1100' is my mistake - I was operating from memory, and anything north of Bede is too contemporary for me, and generally out of my ken...
[...] and into a feudal order where the Church was only one of the players.
That is a bit disingenuous (in this case, at least). There is little doubt that the Roman church was THE player in the Albigensian Crusade. I consider this sort of dissembling to be in poor taste generally (throughout the feudal states) - The buck inherently stops at the top (one of the pitfalls of *having* a top, eh?)... But in this particular, there is *no* shifting of responsibility.
As for the Cathars, are you sure you want to be the champions of a sect that was as different from Christian as the Muslims were? Imagine the Mormons of Joseph Smith but with ten times their numbers?
Need I remind you that you are talking to an American? Of course I will champion them in the case of their collective right, inherently granted by God, to believe as they choose. IIRC, the adherents of the Roman church profess to a belief in 'free will', so the concept should not be incomprehensible to you...
And as an aside, I consider the record to be tainted by Romanist propaganda - The victor writes the history, after all. It is of more consequence that even the local Romanists defended the Cathars against the predations of Rome... and quite often defended them to the point of their own deaths. That speaks volumes, and does much to counter that propaganda. These were, by all accounts other than Rome's, a good and moral people regardless of how their beliefs might differ from yours.
It does, of course, show the futility of suppression. The South of France, where the Cathars were powerful, would be a hotbed of Calvinism and then of revolutionary radicalism.
TRUE, but I see the nexus of that coming from the mountains of Northern Italy (and points northward of that through time). Not the people, mind you - The Message (regardless of how that message may have been bent by the Cathari). That linkage seems evident not only in the Cathars, but also among the Poor Men, Vaudois, the Waldenses, and even, I might suppose (albeit with somewhat less robust evidence), proto-Protestantism. That mountain stronghold was impossible for the Roman church to dispose of. And that message seems to hail from Antioch, not Rome or Alexandria.
Injustice leaves a stain that lasts generations.
In that we almost agree - I would consider the stain indelible.
Religious liberty in a political context works only if the parties involved want peace. When the Turks attacked Vienna in 1683, both sides agreed on one thing:that the God of battles would decide the issue. Pretty much the same applied in the clash between the Christians and the Cathars. Feudalism is the name we give to the polity of the time, Europe was not a single entity except quite loosely something called Christendom, not a unite but more like 10,000 private estates of which maybe 1,000 were controlled by the bishops and monks. There was a spiritual allegiance to the pope and a broader allegiance to a hierarchy of overlords, the most important of which were called kings.
But in the colonies there was no such sharp divisions among the sects. Madison saw the matter in much the same light as he did when he treated special interests in his Federalist #10. That a majority faction is a danger to liberty but that a balance among them worked very well.