Modern feminists see Catharism as actually off-putting for most non-aristocratic women because of the desexualized existence of perfectae, the ubiquitous condemnation of all carnality, the inequalities in hierarchical opportunities and the belief that salvation abolished sexual difference.8
Lay Cathars, the large majority, were known as credentes, believers, who supported the perfecti financially and materially, and expected to receive the consolamentum when nearing death, a procedure reminiscent of Catholic extreme unction and the popular practice of deathbed admission into a religious order. On one occasion, a donor to the abbey of St Sernin in Toulouse was received into the order on his deathbed only for it to be discovered after his burial that he had also received the consolamentum, a neat double indemnity that revealed the Cathar habit of outward or occasional conformity, a trait that greatly worried the Catholic hierarchy. In this case the corpse was quickly dug up and burnt.9 While dual allegiance may have been prudent or simply sociable, it indicated how Cathars could coexist with a Catholic society, as did evidence of genuine conversions of the devout on both sides of the religious divide. Heresy and orthodoxy shared interests, anxieties and learning. In the 1170s, two perfecti were converted to Catholicism and promptly preferred to canonries in Toulouse. Two other thirteenth-century perfecti became prominent Dominican inquisitors into former associates, Rainier Sacconi in Lombardy, who composed an important description of his previous faith, and the brutal Robert le Bougre, i.e. the Bugger or Bulgar, a reference to where it was thought Catharism originated. Traffic also passed in the opposite direction. Theodoric, a leading Cathar theologian who disputed with Catholic preachers in 1207, had once been a canon of Nevers.10
THE CATHARS IN LANGUEDOC
Dualist Christianity in western Europe almost certainly derived from Byzantium, specifically the dualist Bogomil church (named after its founder) established from the early tenth century in Bulgaria, Macedonia and Thrace. Although the evidence is patchy, uncertain and much contested, while some Bogomil evangelists probably visited the west in the early years of the eleventh century, their greatest impact only began a century later, borne on the newly vitalized trade routes linking eastern and western Europe. One source of this proselytizing may have been the dualist church set up by western settlers in Constantinople in the years following the First Crusade. This distinct ‘Latin’ dualist community probably provided western converts with Latin translations of the Greek Bogomil texts including the consolamentum ritual and the New Testament, collated with the Vulgate.11 The first unequivocal signs of recognizably Bogomil/Cathar beliefs in the west date from the mid-twelfth century. Their geographical spread, including the Rhineland, Champagne, Lombardy and western Languedoc; institutional organization as early as the 1140s in Cologne, Champagne, and later Languedoc; as well as subsequent rapid expansion to Lombardy and Italy indicate the presence of well-grounded networks of evangelism. The initial Cathar conversion of Lombardy may have come from northern France and the Rhineland rather than directly from Bulgaria, Thrace or Constantinople, but the early leadership in the west seem to have remained in close touch with the mother churches to the east. By the 1170s at the latest, Cathar bishops had been established in ‘France’ (i.e. northern France), Albi and, probably, Lombardy. In common with elements of the Bogomil church, which was also in the process of evolving its doctrines, these western Cathars espoused mitigated, not absolute, dualism. With the conversion of the western Cathars to absolute dualism, the heretical church, especially in Languedoc, came more clearly into historical focus – and into the line of concerted orthodox Catholic fire.
At some date either in 1167 or, more likely, between 1174 and 1177, a council of western Cathar perfecti and perfectae was held at the village of St Felix de Caraman south-east of Toulouse. An earlier Languedoc Cathar assembly had been held in 1165 at Lombers south of Albi, where heretics held a futile theological disputation with local Catholic partisans. The St Felix gathering attracted an international attendance, including the Cathar bishops of ‘France’, Lombardy and Albi as well as members of the churches of Carcassonne, Agen and Toulouse. A representative of the Cathar church of Constantinople, papa Nicetas, persuaded the assembly to adopt absolute dualism, established three new dioceses, of Carcassonne, Agen and Toulouse, and consecrated their new bishops as well as reconsecrating the bishops of France, Lombardy and Albi and giving all a renewed consolamentum. Nicetas had previously converted the Lombard church to absolute dualism on his way to Languedoc. The theme of his address to the St Felix assembly emphasized the importance of unity, a necessary reminder in the face not just of the incipient fragmentation and factionalism of religious groups but also of the split in dualist ranks between Nicetas’s own absolute dualist church of Thrace and Constantinople and the continuing moderate dualism of the Bulgarian Bogomils. Almost immediately, the Italian dualist church was divided by a mission from the Bogomil Petrach.12 However, the Languedoc churches remained united and thrived.
By the beginning of the thirteenth century there may have been between 1,000 and 1,500 perfecti in the region centred on the area between Toulouse and Carcassonne but stretching north to the Lot valley and the Cahorsin and south to the Pyrenean foothills.13 The number of credentes is impossible to gauge accurately, partly because of the nature of the surviving records but partly because their faith only revealed itself unequivocally through receipt of the consolamentum, by its nature often a hurried private ritual conducted at the bedsides of the sick and dying. More generally, credentes merged into a wider spectrum of response to Cathar belief, from the commitment of the perfectus, lay belief, general sympathy and familial or social contact through hedging religious bets and indifference to distaste, suspicion, opposition and persecution. The fact that each Cathar diocese of Languedoc geographically covered a number of Catholic ones, while reflecting cheaper running costs, may indicate a relatively limited scale of adherence. Languedoc did not become a Cathar province. Donations and recruits to Catholic religious orders continued, the heretics operating as just one of a number of manifestations of piety and religious enthusiasm. The suggestion that Catharism somehow especially embodied a distinctive Languedoc culture is fanciful. For instance, none of the great magnates and few if any of the local troubadours, however critical of the church authorities, were heretics. At least two prominent troubadours, Bertrand of Born and Fulk of Marseilles, became monks, Fulk ending as the anti-Cathar bishop of Toulouse. However, the Cathar church retained hierarchy, structure, organization and funding even beyond the period of the crusades. The raw numerical strength may have been less significant than the quality and social status of many believers and the implications of the mere existence of these organized radical anti-clerical beliefs. The nature of Cathar threat perceived by the Catholic authorities was famously indicated by a knight, Pons Adhemar of Roudeille, in 1206 or 1207. In reply to Bishop Fulk of Toulouse asking why he did not expel heretics from his lands despite admitting the superiority of Catholic theology, he confessed ‘we cannot; we were brought up with them, there are many of our relatives amongst them, and we can see that their way of life is a virtuous one.’14
The prevalence of heresy in Languedoc should not, therefore, be exaggerated. Neither should the geographical, political or cultural identity of the region be assumed. Although it is now fashionable to talk wistfully of the lost glories of Occitania, the land where people spoke the langue d’oc included such diverse regions as the Limousin in the north, the foothills of the Pyrenees in the south and the Alps in the east, the wastes of the Camargue in the Rhone Delta, the volcanic outcrops of Le Puy, the Massif Central, the Provencal hills and the commercial Mediterranean towns of Narbonne and Montpellier. Even within the part of region more commonly now understood as Languedoc, roughly from the lower Garonne and Dordogne valleys eastwards and southwards to the Pyrenees, Mediterranean and Rhone valley, largely associated, often very tenuously, with the county of Toulouse, geography contradicted politics. Toulouse, although less than 100 miles from the Mediterranean, sat on the Garonne, whose waters flowed into the Atlantic, for much of its course though lands ruled by the Angevin kings of England, who, until the early thirteenth century, as dukes of Aquitaine controlled most of the region from the Loire to the Pyrenees as well as Normandy and Anjou. The twelfth-century counts of Toulouse had to resist Angevin attempts at domination and continued to hold the Agenais as an Angevin fief. Much of the region to the south and east of Toulouse, which drained into the Mediterranean, looked more to Catalonia and Aragon than northern France or even northern Languedoc; the king of Aragon was overlord of the viscounts of Beziers and Carcassonne, as well as parts of the Gevaudan and the Pyrenean counties such as Foix and Comminges. East of the Rhone in Provence, suzerainty lay with the distant German emperor.
The term ‘Albigensian’ (literally ‘of’ or ‘from Albi’, a cathedral city on the river Tarn forty miles or so north-
