The Albigensian Crusades
by Not all crusades were fought far from home. A crusade is technically any Holy War blessed by the pope which has the aim of converting people of a different religious faith to Christianity (or their extermination) and which promised the remission sin and a guaranteed place in heaven for the people who fought. The Albigensian Crusade was against the people of Languedoc. The crusade began in 1208 and was blessed by pope Innocent III. The Albigensian Crusades were a series of formal crusades, interspersed with continual warfare which lasted about forty years. As the pope had called the war, the participants could wear a cross on their tunics, like the crusaders in Palestine.
The Albigensian Crusades are also known as the Cathar Crusades. Cathar is one of many names the Roman Church invented for members of this sort of Gnostic Dualism. Albigensian comes from the belief that they were concentrated in the town of Albi. Cathar is a more recent term.
The Languedoc is now part of France but in the thirteenth century it wasn’t and the crusaders were foreigners in the area even though they were French.
The Cathar Religion
In the Languedoc people practiced a civilized, easy-going religious tolerance. There was no fanatical zeal the way there was in other parts of Europe. Here learning and philosophy thrived, poetry and courtly love were celebrated and Greek, Arabic and Hebrew were learnt. Schools of Kaballah, an ancient exoteric tradition of Judaism, prospered.
For Rome, the Cathars in 1200 had a form of heresy that could actually replace the Roman Catholicism as the main form of Christianity. The Cathars believed in reincarnation and recognised the feminine principle in religion. Cathars had both male and female preachers and teachers. They also rejected the validity of all clerical hierarchies, anyone who was supposed to intercede between man and God.
The important Cathar tenet was faith shouldn’t be accepted second hand but should be based on personal knowledge, a religious or mystical experience that the individual experienced for themselves. This experience is called gnosis from the Greek word for knowledge and this took precedence over all creeds and dogma for the Cathars, rendering all priests, bishops and other clerics unnecessary.
The Cathars were also dualists, believing everything was based on the conflict between good and evil. For the Cathars there were two gods of comparable status. The “good” God, made of pure spirit, unsullied by the taint of matter. This was the god of love and love was deemed totally incompatible with power and material creation was the manifestation of power. So for the Cathars, the world, being made up of matter, was a manifestation of power and, therefore, intrinsically evil. It had been made by a “usurper god”, the god of evil, who they called “Rex Mundi”, “King of the World”.
As the Cathars believed that matter was intrinsically evil, Jesus could not become flesh incarnate and still be the Son of God. Jesus seems to have been regarded as a prophet by the Cathars, who died on the cross on behalf of the principle of love. So the Crucifixion was of no importance and Jesus a prophet of amor, the principle of love. When amor was perverted or twisted into power, it became Roma – Rome, which seemed to the Cathars, with its opulent, luxury, a visible embodiment of the power of Rex Mundi on earth.
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