The Perfect Heresy Read Free Page A

that often gets obscured by the flash of armored knights. The Cathar heresy, a pacifist brand of Christianity embracing tolerance and poverty, rose to prominence in the middle of the so-called renaissance of the twelfth century, the time whenEurope shook off the intellectual torpor that had afflicted it for hundreds of years. It was a period of change, experimentation, and broader horizons. After 1095, the year Pope Urban II had urged Christendom to retake Jerusalem, tens of thousands had gone charging off to Palestine in search of adventure and salvation—and returned as men and women who had seen, if not understood, that life was organized differently elsewhere. At home, the towns began to grow for the first time since the fall of the Roman Empire, and the great era of cathedral building got under way. Schools formed, as yet unfettered by the strictures of a watchful hierarchy. The spread of new ideas and the birth of new ambitions often led to dissatisfaction with an early medieval Church more suited to a benighted age of huddled monks and shivering peasantries. The great awakening of the twelfth century ushered in an era of spiritual longing that searched and often found the sublime outside the fortress of orthodoxy. The Cathars were joined by other heretical groups—notably the Waldensians, or the “Poor Men of Lyons”—in lashing out at the mainstream religion.
    Catharism thrived in regions farthest along the road from the Dark Ages: the merchant cities of Italy, the trading centers of Champagne and the Rhineland, and, especially, the fractious checkerboard of familial holdings and independent towns that made up Languedoc at the end of the twelfth century. The fate of the Cathars became wedded to the destiny of Languedoc, for it was there where the heretics prospered most and won disciples in every quarter of society, from mountain shepherd and hillside yeoman to lowland noble and urban merchant. When attacked, the creed’s small priestly class—that is, the ascetics known as the
Perfect
—found a militant multitude of protectors from among its far-reaching network of kinsman, convert, and anticlerical sympathizer. The Perfect heresy was ideally, indeed perfectly, suited to the tolerant feudalism of Languedoc, and for that its people would pay a terrible tribute. The region entered the thirteenth century a voluble anomaly in the chorus of European Christianity, its culture enlivened by poetic troubadours and revolutionary Cathars; 100 years later, Languedoc had been swallowed whole by the kings of France, its fearful towns the proving grounds for ambitious inquisitors and royal magistrates.

     
    Without the Cathars, the nobles beholden to the Capet monarchyand its small woodland territory around the city of Paris—the Ile de France—might never have found a pretext to swoop down on the Mediterranean and force the unlikely annexation of Languedoc to the Crown of France. Languedoc shared a culture and language with its cousin south of the Pyrenees, the kingdom of Aragon and Barcelona, one of the Christian fiefs that would eventually roll back the Muslim Moors from the rest of the Iberian Peninsula. Arguably, Languedoc “belonged” with Aragon, not with the Frankish northerners who would someday create the entity known as France. * Without the convulsion of the Albigensian Crusade, the map and makeup of Europe could very well have been different.
    Although firmly anchored in the politics and society of its era, the story of the Cathars also forms an important—and harrowing—chapter in the history of ideas. The heresy hinged upon the question of Good and Evil. Not that one side in the struggle over Languedoc was good and the other bad, even if propagandists for both sides claimed that such was the case. Rather, the fundamental disagreement between Catholic orthodoxy and Cathar heterodoxy, their irreducible bone of contention, concerned the role and power of Evil in life.
    For the Cathars, the world was not