east of Toulouse) to describe the Cathars of Languedoc is something of a misnomer. Despite the earliest Cathar diocese being based there, the heaviest concentration of Cathars existed further south. The name ‘Albigensian’ gained wide currency only after the crusades had begun with the northern invaders, possibly because their first target in 1209 was Raymond Roger Trencavel, lord, among other places, of Albi. Innocent III used the term only once. Its use by the French conquerors illustrated their ignorance of the land they annexed.15 Until the Albigensian crusades, little integration of southern and western Languedoc into the kingdom of France was apparent. Just as the victories of Philip II of France against King John in the early years of the thirteenth century reoriented the political direction of north-west France, so the victories of Simon of Montfort and later Louis VIII under the banner of the cross determined that the French crown would have direct access to the Mediterranean and the surrounding region would look to Paris and the Seine not Barcelona or the Ebro. Within this region, the Cathars prospered in only a relatively small area, their presence increasingly peripheral to the wider political conflict that their armed suppression provoked. The Albigensian crusades settled the fate of nations more readily than it did the destiny of souls or faith.
The health of the Cathar church in Languedoc rested on weak or competing political authority; a feeble and impoverished church hierarchy; and a failure of cooperation between church and secular lords. To this could be added a lack of centres of Catholic learning. It was no coincidence that the university of Toulouse was only founded as part of the settlement that ended the crusades in 1229 in preparation for the judicial eradication of heresy. In northern France and western Germany, secular authorities were persuaded by active and well-funded bishops that heresy posed a threat to social as well as religious order. By contrast, in Languedoc local lords were alienated from the church, especially with the influx of reform-minded Gregorian churchmen, over control of church tithes and first fruits, the bulk of which tended to remain in the hands of laymen, with a smaller proportion left for parish clergy and nothing for the bishops. Bishop Fulk of Toulouse complained that on entering office in 1205 he found his revenues amounted to ninety-six sous; he could not afford to protect his train of mules in public and was confronted by creditors in his own chapter house.16 Lay appropriation of ecclesiastical funds not only weakened the church, it denied any material incentive for the local lords to succour it.
Attempts by the church or magnates to impose social or religious discipline sat ill with an aristocratic culture that militated against hierarchical control in favour of clannish independence. The structure of rural aristocratic society was characterized by what contemporaries described as paratge.17 Literally, this meant the free right to one’s inheritance. Perhaps almost 50 per cent of lands in the Toulousain were held as allods, owing no dues to a lord. Freedom was a feature of rural as well as urban society, where towns, even parts of towns, insisted on separate autonomy and rights. Vassalage was weak, especially compared with parts of northern France or England; military obligations rare. Equality, not subservience, typified how relations between lords and tenants were conceived. Knighthood denoted status and a mutually respectful position at a lord’s court rather than a niche in a pyramidal social hierarchy. If paratge implied independence from external pressure on the disposal of lands it also protected the rights of all possible heirs within the family, which led to a sharing of fiefs. Primogeniture had not come to dominate Languedoc inheritance customs as it had further north. One consequence of partible inheritance was the proliferation of co-lords; at the extremes dozens at one time.18 Another was the preservation of the inheritance rights of women, which were being sharply eroded further north. While the economics of partible inheritance and paratge encouraged infra-family cohesion, they discouraged wider social cohesion.
However, contemporaries in Languedoc seemed to invest the paratge system with almost transcendent cultural significance as a symbol of nobility, of the free customs of a whole society and of a system of aristocratic life, from courtly entertainments to independence, knightly generosity, personal honour and public morality. His enemies depicted Simon of Montfort as deliberately trying to destroy this world of paratge.19 Yet, while some have seen in paratge the principle of personal freedom, it might just as well be held responsible for noble selfishness, which produced a failure of public law and order. Violence between the clan groups of Languedoc may have been petty but it could be vicious; the sight of so many small castles perched on their neighbouring crags still provides evidence of this insecurity. Landholders felt little obligation or loyalty to their nominal overlords. As a direct consequence, to maintain and impose authority, great magnates had to resort to hiring mercenaries, an unpleasant feature of Languedoc life that drew condemnation from the Third Lateran Council in 1179.20 The absence of peace in Languedoc formed one of the twin themes of crusade propaganda, which frequently described the conflict as the negotium fidei et pacis, the business of the faith and of peace. The inability of the count to impose order exposed the feebleness of the episcopacy and encouraged the flourishing of heresy.
The patronage of Catharism by local noble families proved crucial to the heretics’ success and represented one of the Languedoc heresy’s most distinctive features. Elsewhere, from Bulgaria to Italy and France, Germany and Flanders, popular heresy appeared particularly attractive to urban artisans and the rural poor. Yet despite Cathar communities in Toulouse and the much smaller towns such as Beziers and Carcassonne, urbanization in the areas of Languedoc most affected was limited. There was little or no heresy in Narbonne, the second great city of the region. Rural Catharism revolved around the small castles, fortified villages and households of the local nobility, whose adherence to the radical faith was eased by the sophisticated literary cosmology imported by Nicetas from Constantinople, which was not predicated on hierarchical social or economic tensions or guilt. Lords had much to gain from opposing Catholic assertion of financial ecclesiastical rights and from the Cathars’ absolute, rather than the Catholics’ conditional, separation of church and state. In return, support from social leaders afforded Catharism material protection and financial support; physical centres for study and proselytizing; and networks for the transmission of the faith both laterally, through extended aristocratic family contacts, and vertically, to the servants, tenants and peasants of the lords. One of the common accusations levelled against Cathar perfecti was that they preyed on the vulnerable – the sick, dying or anxious – with promises of unconditional salvation through the consolamentum in return for gifts and legacies of money and property. True or not, the financial viability of the Cathar church, which distinguished it from other heretical sects, including the smaller Waldensian community in the region, probably depended less on deathbed larceny than well-heeled patrons.
The patronage of the nobility politicized the Languedoc Cathars, encouraging a political response: war. Although there is no evidence that the greatest magnates, such as the counts of Toulouse or the Trencavel counts of Albi, Beziers and Carcassonne, were heretics themselves, Cathar perfecti were to be found in some of the grander local aristocratic families. As early as 1178, Raymond V of Toulouse was lamenting ‘the plague of infidelity’ that had claimed ‘the most noble of my lords’ and many of their followers.21 When inheriting his title as a child, Viscount Raymond Roger Trencavel (1194–1209) had been placed under the protection of a patron of heretics, Bernard of Saissac. Count Raymond Roger of Foix (1188–1223) earned an evil reputation among Catholic observers for his depredations against local monasteries and churches, on one occasion slaughtering monks who had been disrespectful of his perfecta aunt, Fais of Dufort.22 The count’s wife and sister were also perfectae, although his anti-clerical behaviour probably had more to do with money and jurisdiction than faith. The mother and two of the sisters of the wealthy and powerful Aimery, the lord of Lavaur and Montreal west of Carcassonne, were Cathars who established a flourishing house for perfectae at Lavaur. The family castles became centres of extensive networks of Cathar perfecti, credentes and sympathizers, provoking the ferocity following Simon of Montfort’s capture of Lavaur, the ‘synagogue of Satan’, in May 1211. Aimery was hanged; eighty of his knights were put to the sword and between 300 and 400 Cathars burnt. Aimery’s sister, the perfecta Girauda, lady of Lavaur, was flung screaming into a well and rocks thrown on top of her.23 However, the atrocities at Lavaur contained a political purpose and message. Aimery’s power had already been severely undermined by the crusader invasion; his knights were regarded by Montfort as traitors, regardless of their devotional practices; the butchery served to discourage further resistance to the northern conquerors. The intimate association of secular lords with heretical networks put each in additional jeopardy from an adversary as intent on subjugating lordships as in eradicating error. Heresy in Languedoc had been recognized as a problem for over sixty years before the start of the Albigensian crusades. The iconoclastic anti-sacramentalist Peter of Bruys enjoyed some notoriety before his execution at St Gilles in 1131. In 1145, Bernard of Clairvaux conducted a concerted and apparently successful preaching campaign in pursuit of Henry the Monk, an itinerant anti-clerical Donatist who had established a base in Toulouse after a long career evangelizing in western France. By 1178, the rise of Catharism sufficiently alarmed Raymond V of Toulouse for him to appeal
