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ALBIGENSIAN CRUSADE

Death toll: 1 million¹

Rank: 46

Type: religious war

Broad dividing line: Catholics vs. Cathars

Time frame: 1208–29

Location: southern France

Who usually gets the most blame: Pope Innocent III, Simon de Montfort

A Perfect Storm

Catharism was a persistent heresy that survived several centuries of attempted eradication all across Christendom. Cathars believed that Jesus was not of this corrupt world but was a purely divine entity, a phantom. He had come to replace the vicious, vengeful God of the Old Testament who had created our flawed universe. The word Cathar came from the Greek word for purity, and Cathars believed that all people should strive to separate themselves from the corruption of the material world to reach a condition called Perfect. They also believed that humans needed no intermediaries to receive Jesus’s salvation, which obviously did not go over well with the Roman Catholic Church. After many centuries of persecution, the Cathars were finally exterminated in their last stronghold in the south of France in the thirteenth century.

Crusade

Sovereignty was complicated in the Languedoc region of southern France. Although the French king had ultimate dominion over the region, outsiders like the kings of England and Spain had some valuable fiefdoms scattered around the area as well. Feudal lords had even more autonomy here than most of their peers elsewhere.

The lack of central authority attracted heretics. Cathars—called Albigensians here—weren’t the majority in Languedoc, but they were a tolerated minority. Enough local lords, such as the powerful Count Raymond VI of Toulouse, considered them useful, peaceful citizens and gave them protection. This annoyed the Catholic Church, which accused the Cathars of the usual atrocities—sodomy, devil worship, baby stealing, and desecration of holy objects. In May 1207 Raymond was excommunicated by the church for being uncooperative in its efforts to eradicate the Cathars.

In January 1208, Rome sent an envoy into the region to try to convince Raymond to stamp out the heretics. After unsuccessful and angry negotiations, unknown assassins killed the papal representative while he was returning home. The church blamed Raymond.

Pope Innocent III now preached a full crusade against the heretics. This was especially popular in northern France because anyone who took up the cross against the Cathars would earn the same spiritual bonus points with God as fighting in the Holy Land—without having to take a long, queasy sea voyage or eat disgusting foreign foods. Ten thousand of them gathered in Lyon.

Beziers

The crusaders attacked the city of Beziers first. It was well fortified and well supplied, and everyone expected it to withstand a siege, but on the first day, as the crusaders were setting up the camp, several shiftless camp followers—cooks, drivers, and so on—went down to a shaded creek beneath the city walls to rest and cool off.

Defenders on the wall started exchanging insults with the northern riffraff, and tempers frayed. The townsmen decided to go outside and teach the stray northerners a lesson. Unfortunately, during this sortie, they left the town gate wide open, filled with cheering civilians. Others in the crusader camp spotted the fight. They grabbed their clubs and rushed over to join the melee, finally chasing the townsmen back inside and following hard on their heels. As northerners got inside the gate, soldiers from the town rushed down from the city walls to drive them out. Distracted by the brawl, no one noticed that some of the more quick-witted crusaders had snuck in and propped ladders up against the suddenly unguarded walls.

And that was the end of Beziers.

As the crusaders eradicated this hotbed of heresy, the leader of the Catholic forces, Simon de Montfort, was asked how they could tell the heretics from the orthodox. His solution was simple: “Kill them all; God will know his own.”^a Thousands of civilians took sanctuary in the town church, but the crusaders followed them inside and slaughtered them anyway. Although most of the townspeople were Catholic, all of the inhabitants of Beziers—20,000 people—were massacred regardless of religion.²

Root and Branch

Town after town fell to the crusaders. After the water supply to Carcassonne was cut, the inhabitants surrendered and were exiled with just the clothes they wore. The mountain fortress of Minerve near Beziers lost its water supply when crusader catapults destroyed the fortified tunnel to the town’s well. After Minerve surrendered, the Cathars were forcibly converted to Catholicism, except for 140 who refused and were burned.

After the capture of Bram, every member of the Cathar garrison had his eyes gouged out and his nose and upper lip sliced off. Only one soldier was left with a single eye intact in order to guide the faceless men back to spread fear in Cathar territory.³

Raymond of Toulouse had been keeping a low profile, riding along in support of the crusade, but after a year of watching his domain become ravaged, he switched sides. After Toulouse withstood a siege by Simon de Montfort, Raymond counterattacked, retaking much of the lost territory and bringing Montfort under siege. The next year, the Catholics had the upper hand and ended up outside Toulouse again. Because Raymond was the vassal and brother-in-law of King Peter II of Aragon in northern Spain, this king now joined the fight against the crusaders.

Languedoc became a maelstrom of battle, and Toulouse changed hands several times before it was all done, but the war dragged on, year after year, without a final knockout blow. Because the pope required only forty days of crusading to earn God’s favor, the holy mobs that came south every summer for the campaign season would pack up and go home six weeks later, leaving Simon de Montfort alone in Languedoc to face the Cathar counterattack.⁴

The war lasted longer than its major participants. King Peter II of Spain was killed in battle at Muret in 1213. In 1218, Simon de Montfort was killed outside Toulouse by a stone from a catapult manned by women of the town. Raymond fled to England for a time, then went to Rome to plead his case; he returned to fight and finally died in 1222.

During the 1220s the war continued under a new generation of leaders, sons of Simon and Raymond, but one by one the last Cathar strongholds fell and stayed down. In 1226, King Louis VIII of France pledged himself to the crusade, and now the full French army overwhelmed the heretics in one tough year of campaigning. The king then negotiated acceptable terms with the principal nobles of the south, and the Treaty of Paris ended hostilities in 1229.⁵

In 1229, Rome established the Inquisition in Toulouse to make sure none of the supposed converts were secretly practicing their old heretical ways. Sporadic rebellions and uprisings continued in the hinterlands for several decades. Apostates were hunted down. Relapsed or stubborn Cathars were burned—the last of them in 1321.⁶