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The Cathar heresy (also called Albigensian, from the city of Albi) was the most important heretical movement of the High Middle Ages. The Cathars emerged in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, and they flourished in southern France and northern Italy in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The Cathars rejected the material world as the creation of an evil principle, they rejected the institution of the Church as the creation of that evil principle, and they rejected the sacraments as the means of salvation in the material world. The Cathar movement was a serious challenge to the institutional Church, and it provoked one of the most brutal and most controversial campaigns of persecution in medieval history.
The standard English-language treatment is Malcolm Barber, “The Cathars” (2000). The inquisitorial registers of the Toulouse inquisition (the Doat manuscripts, the Bibliothèque municipale de Toulouse, MS 609) are the primary sources, with the edition in Jean Duvernoy and others.
The Origins of the Cathar Movement
The origins of the Cathar movement are obscure, but the most important roots are in the Bogomils of the Balkans and in the Paulicians of Armenia and Byzantine Asia Minor. The Bogomils were a dualist Christian movement in the Bulgarian and Byzantine empires of the tenth and eleventh centuries, and the Paulicians were a dualist Christian movement in Armenia and Byzantine Asia Minor of the seventh to the ninth centuries. The Bogomil and Paulician missionaries traveled to the West in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and they converted the peoples of southern France and northern Italy to the dualist faith.
The Cathar movement in the West emerged in the late eleventh century, and it flourished in the twelfth century in the Languedoc of southern France and the Lombard region of northern Italy. The movement attracted followers from all social classes — knights, merchants, craftsmen, peasants — and it became a major religious and political force in the region.
The Doctrines of the Cathars
The Cathar doctrine was based on a dualist cosmology. The Cathars believed that there were two principles in the universe — a good spiritual principle and an evil material principle — and that the material world was the creation of the evil principle. The Cathars rejected the Old Testament as the work of the evil principle, they rejected the institution of the Church as the creation of the evil principle, and they rejected the sacraments as the means of salvation in the material world. The Cathars believed that salvation was achieved by the liberation of the spirit from the body, and they practiced an ascetic discipline designed to free the spirit from the bonds of matter.
The Cathar movement was organized around a hierarchy of believers and perfects. The believers lived ordinary lives in the world, but they received the consolamentum — the Cathar baptism and the central ritual of the movement — at the hour of death, and they attempted to live according to the Cathar principles in the interval. The perfects — the Cathar clergy — lived an ascetic life of poverty, chastity, and abstinence from animal food, and they devoted themselves to the ministry of the consolamentum and the pastoral care of the believers.
The Spread of the Movement
The Cathar movement was particularly strong in the Lombard region of northern Italy and in the Languedoc — the region of southern France centered on Toulouse, Albi, Carcassonne, and Béziers. The Languedoc of the twelfth century was a region of high culture, with its own language (Occitan), its own literature (the troubadour tradition), and its own political institutions (the courtly society of the great lords). The Cathar movement found a fertile soil in this region, where the corruption of the clergy and the luxury of the Church had produced a skeptical attitude toward institutional religion.
The Cathar movement attracted the support of many of the great lords of the Languedoc — the counts of Toulouse, the viscounts of Béziers and Béziers, the lords of Foix — and the Cathar perfects were often invited to the courts of the great lords and welcomed in the homes of the merchants and craftsmen. The Cathar movement was closely tied to the courtly culture of the region, and the Cathar critique of the material Church resonated with the courtly ideals of refinement and spirituality.
The Response of the Church
The response of the Church to the Cathar heresy was multi-faceted. The papal legates were sent to the Languedoc to preach and to convert, and the Cistercian monks, especially St. Bernard of Clairvaux, conducted missionary campaigns in the region. The Dominican Order was founded, in part, to combat the Cathar heresy, and the papal Inquisition was established to suppress the movement. The most dramatic response, however, was the Albigensian Crusade of 1209–1229, a military campaign proclaimed by Pope Innocent III and led by the northern French lords with the support of the papacy.
The Albigensian Crusade was marked by brutal episodes. The massacre at Béziers in 1209, in which the Crusaders killed an estimated 7,000 to 20,000 people, men, women, and children, Catholic as well as Cathar, is one of the most infamous episodes of the medieval persecution of heresy. The Crusade continued for twenty years and effectively destroyed the Cathar movement as a political and social force. The Treaty of Meaux-Paris in 1229 officially ended the Crusade and annexed the Languedoc to the French royal domain.
The Inquisition and the Cathars
The papal Inquisition was established in 1231 to suppress the Cathar heresy and the other heretical movements of the region. The Inquisition was staffed by Dominican and Franciscan friars, and it developed a sophisticated legal procedure for the investigation, trial, and punishment of heretics. The Inquisition arrested Cathar believers and perfects, confiscated their property, and imprisoned or executed those who refused to recant. The Inquisition also targeted the sympathizers of the Cathars — the families of the Cathar believers, the merchants who traded with the Cathars, the lords who sheltered the Cathars — and it imposed a regime of surveillance and punishment on the region.
The Inquisition was effective in suppressing the Cathar movement, but it did not eliminate it entirely. Individual Cathars continued to practice their faith in secret for many years after the Crusade, and the last known Cathar perfect, Guilhabert de Castres, died in exile in Italy in 1320. The Cathar movement survived in various forms until the fourteenth century, and the memory of the Cathars continued to shape the religious and cultural life of the region for centuries.
The Legacy of the Cathars
The legacy of the Cathars is complex and controversial. The Cathars were persecuted by the Church and crushed by the medieval period, but they retained a sympathetic image in the popular memory of the region and in the wider European imagination. The Cathars were romanticized as martyrs of the faith and as victims of religious intolerance, and the Cathar movement was seen as a precursor of the later Protestant Reformation.
The scholarly assessment of the Cathars has changed significantly over the past century. Earlier historians, influenced by the nationalism of the nineteenth century, sometimes saw the Cathars as a regional expression of resistance to the northern French and papal oppression. More recent scholarship has stressed the complexity of the Cathar movement and the diversity of the Cathar followers, and it has emphasized the religious dimensions of the movement and the brutality of the persecution that suppressed it.
Sources
Principal sources used in this article:
- R. I. Moore, The War on Heresy (Profile, 2012).
Further reading:
- Malcolm Barber, The Cathars (Longman, 2000).
For a recent single-volume synthesis with full scholarly apparatus, see the relevant chapter of Barbara H. Rosenwein, A Short History of the Middle Ages (University of Toronto Press, 2014).