God's War: A New History of the Crusades

added concentration by orthodox Christians on the corruption of the world and the implications of sin and evil may have lent added encouragement to those who sought alternative and more satisfying doctrines. The vita apostolica trumpeted by reformers, not least Innocent III’s own teams of licensed preachers, explicitly condemned many of the church’s temporal accretions. More fundamentally, the sharp distinction between the spiritual and temporal spheres that lay at the heart of the Gregorian reformist critique highlighted the eternal paradox of God and Matter, the presence of evil in a world created by a beneficent Deity. Incentive to question belief and practice followed perennial orthodox interest in the nature and immanence of God, expressed by theologians such as Anselm of Canterbury, preachers such as Bernard of Clairvaux and generations of academics at the university of Paris. This was matched by official concern with the state of the church and its ministers, constantly lashed by the criticisms of Gregorian papal reformers. By challenging traditional assumptions and structures and by posing fundamental questions about the nature of the church and the place of religion in society, Catholic reformers, while engineering a transformation in their church, indicated paths that led away from disciplined uniformity. Heresy, defined as systems of belief unacceptable to prevailing ecclesiastical authority, flourished as the church’s leadership proclaimed first principles; as Gregory VII commented, ‘Christ did not say I am Tradition but I am the Truth.’ Radicalism rarely flows along neat channels. Heresy became reform’s inescapable companion in the search for solutions to these central issues of faith and observance. The western medieval church’s age of reformation c. 1050–1300 was therefore also its great age of heresy.⁵

Some heresies sprang from academic debate and hardly left the lecture room; others from evanescent personality cults; others from wider social dissent and alienation. Many shared an element of biblical fundamentalism; all a rejection of church authority in favour of direct personal or communal appreciation of scripture and faith outside official norms, mediation and control. Often flourishing in areas of weak or disputed secular and ecclesiastical authority, few regions of western Christendom escaped entirely as church leaders strove to maintain control lest reform turned to licence and destroyed the institution it was intended to improve. Even traditional, conservative and closely governed England attracted its small crop of heretics in the 1160s.⁶ Boundaries between orthodoxy and heresy could be narrow and shifting; passage between the two was frequent, despite the apocalyptic rhetoric of mutual hate and demonization. Most heretical groups succumbed rapidly after the removal of a charismatic leader or through the customary factious divisiveness of the righteous. However, some established lasting identity in distinct theologies, liturgies, literature and organization. The most successful such group to challenge the institution as well as the theology of the Catholic church in this period were the Cathars, whose success in promoting their solution to the problem of evil in the area nominally under the rule of the counts of Toulouse provoked the Albigensian crusades.

The word Cathar derives from the Greek katharos meaning clean or pure. The central insight of the Cathars explained the existence of evil as the result of creation being determined by two principles of Good and Evil. The Cathars were thus dualists, but, in common with the seventh-century eastern Christian dualist sect of Paulicians, Christians, unlike non-Christian dualists such as the Manichees and Gnostics of the late classical world. For Cathars, the material world was logically the creation of an evil creator, not the Good God, whose realm was of the spirit. Two identifications of this evil creator were proposed by different Cathar traditions. The so-called mitigated dualists saw the evil creator as a fallen angel, Satan, who had seduced numbers of the eternal angelic souls in heaven and imprisoned them in material bodies. Alternatively, according to the more extreme or absolute dualists who dominated western Catharism from the later twelfth century, the material world had been created by an co-eternal power of evil, in some texts Lucifer’s or Satan’s father, into whose material human bodies of fallen angels the Good God had breathed divine life. In both versions, the goal of man was escape from the material body though the ceremony of consolamentum (from the Latin for comforting). Ultimately, when all the angelic souls of humans had been released to rejoin their guardian spirits in heaven, the two worlds of Spirit and Matter would be restored to their entirely separate spheres. Given the burden of sin in the world, the journey of some souls to the consolamentum could involve periods locked in other material objects and animals.

Cathar theology accepted parts of the New Testament and a few passages of the Old while radically reinterpreting them. The Catholic doctrine of the Trinity was rejected as, inevitably, was the Incarnation, although a reordered trinitarian hierarchy seems to have been accepted. By definition, God could not become material, and therefore the Crucifixion and Resurrection could not have occurred, except perhaps in some metaphorical or symbolic show in the spiritual world. The rejection of Catholic sacramental teaching was, consequentially, absolute. One appeal of Catharism may have lain precisely in this challenge to the increasingly prescriptive penitential and sacramental systems imposed by the church and the consequent perception of its growing intrusion and financial profiteering in social and private life. Cathars followed the Donatist heretics of the early church in arguing that the spiritual power of priests and the efficacy of their ministry depended on their own moral state, which made their own priestly hierarchy vulnerable to the slightest charges of hypocrisy, backsliding or corruption. Once again, this addressed current orthodox concerns. Gregory VII himself had flirted with similar ideas. Given the paucity of surviving Cathar texts, unmediated by hostile interpreters or the judicial formulae of the Inquisition, aspects of their theology and mysticism remain obscure, but its themes ran parallel to the concerns of orthodox theologians with sin, the means of salvation and the sacraments. In many respects the asceticism of the Cathars, the flight from the secular, the awareness of the snares of materialism and the sense of the reality of evil mirrored Catholic spirituality. The segregated Cathar communities of men and women found echoes in monasticism. Like Catholicism, Catharism was ‘a written church’, literate, founded on liturgical as well as theological and mystical texts.⁷ Unlike another tenacious contemporary heresy, the scriptural fundamentalist Waldensians, Catharism was not a discarded offshoot of the Catholic church but an independent Christian denomination whose theological antecedents and continuing intellectual affinities lay with similar churches in the Byzantine Balkans rather than in the west. Nonetheless, the flourishing of Catharism, even if in an apparently remote orbit, occupied part of the universe of western religious, intellectual and cultural revival and expansion known to historians as the Twelfth-century Renaissance.

The structure of the Cathar church reflected the rigorous austerity of its theology. Most adherents were unprepared or unable to comply with the denial of materialism and human comforts prescribed for the full initiates. The church was organized into dioceses, each led by a bishop and two assistants, called elder and younger ‘sons’, who constituted the order of episcopal succession, supported by deacons. Perfecti or perfectae, men and women who had taken the consolamentum, acted as the church’s priests, also known as Boni Homines, Good Men, sometimes itinerant, sometimes living communally in segregated houses, sometimes distinguished by the dark cloaks they wore as a sign of their status of purity. Major decisions affecting the church were discussed at diocesan or provincial councils. Before the beginning of the crusades in 1209, when such encounters began to court arrest, imprisonment or death, formal disputations were often conducted with Catholic preachers, another sign that the Cathar church was far from a nest of bucolic sectaries ministered to by an obscurantist order of hedge priests. There were numerous halls of residence for perfecti, and extensive networks of formal and informal study groups of believers, involving men and women of all social classes. There were even special Cathar cemeteries. Of central importance to the spread of informed belief, and to the impression of a genuinely popular as well as sophisticated religion, were the vernacular Cathar translations from Latin of religious texts, especially of the Vulgate version of the Bible and the Cathar liturgies.

The attraction of Catharism to women is well attested, if equivocal. Although child bearing was considered evil, the Good God made no discrimination between the souls of men and women. Nature was diabolic, so women were no more so than men. Cathar women could, like their Catholic equivalents, preside over religious communities, except that they were able to attain the ranks of the perfects/priests that were denied Catholic nuns and abbesses. However, the undisguised Cathar hatred of female bodies spoke of entrenched misogyny. Perfectae were not permitted to act as deacons, ‘sons’ or bishops, nor were they customarily engaged in hearing confessions or giving the consolamentum without a perfectus present. Nor, it seems, were Cathar women, even perfectae, much engaged in transmitting or even reading texts, an activity which seemed, accidentally or not, a masculine preserve. The Cathar hostility to procreation, specifically pregnancy, may well have dissuaded lay women from believing: pregnant women were denied the right to receive the consolamentum, in theory even if in extremis during labour.