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.
All this meant that the Cathars refused to worship the cross but denied the sacraments of Baptism and Communion. They led lives of extreme devotion and simplicity. They held their services in the open air or any convenient building such as a barn, a house, a municipal hall as they disapproved of churches. They practiced mediation and were strict vegetarian.
The Crusades
The Church tried to find a solution to this dangerous heresy unsuccessfully and in 1208, Peter of Castelnau, the papal legate was murdered by a vassal of Raymond VI, Count of Toulouse. So Pope Innocent III called for a crusade. He used the Augustinian argument that justified the use of force against religious deviation to protect orthodoxy and to compel heretics to renounce their errors for their own good.
Thirty thousand knights and foot soldiers from northern Europe descended on the Languedoc led by Arnold Aimery, abbot of Cîteau, the papal legate in July and August 1209. The extermination of populations, cities and crops during the Crusade was big enough to be called the first “genocide” in modern European history. For example, in one town fifteen thousand men, women and children were slaughtered, many of them who had sought sanctuary in the church. When the pope’s representative was asked how to tell which were heretics and which true believers, he replied, “Kill them al. God will recognise his own.”
The main target of the Crusade was Raymond VI of Toulouse and his vassals but Raymond joined the Crusade, meaning that he and his vassals came under the protection of the Church. So the first part of the Crusade was against Béziers and Carcassonne, which belonged to a close relative of Raymond’s called Ramon-Roger Trencavel. Trencavel was imprisoned after Béziers and Carcassonne fell. This ruse didn’t work for long and Raymond was soon excommunicated and his castles attacked. Simon de Montfort led the mainly French Crusaders after the first sieges. Montfort overcame most of the opposition and his campaign ended with the defeat and death of Peter II, King of Aragon, at the battle of Muret in 1213.
The conflict was now a mainly political struggle, for Peter of Aragon was not a defender of heresy. In 1215, Raymond VI and his son were condemned as fautors of heresy, they began a new offensive. In 1218, Montfort was killed whilst besieging Toulouse. This undermined the Crusade so much that by 1225, the count had managed to regain his lands. In 1226 the French King Louis VIII joined the conflict and the Crusade was able to finally overcome southern resistance. In the Treaty of Paris of 1229, Raymond VII had to give up approximately two-thirds of his lands and agree to the marriage of his daughter, Jeanne, to one of the king’s brothers. So, rather than the Church, the French crown was the real winner as its authority was now extended into the Languedoc. Catharism remained influential, at least until the 1240s, when a combination of royal military intervention, northern settlement, and papal inquisitorial tribunals, slowly eroded its social base. The Crusades are said to have ended in 1244 when the Château of Montségur fell but Cathars were still being burned alive into the fourteenth century.
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