The Cathars, and the Crusade Called Against Them

Provence and the wider Occitan-speaking south of France held, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the best organised religious dissent in western Europe before the Reformation. Its adherents were called Cathars by their opponents and known locally as good men and good women; they held a dualist theology in which the visible world is the work of an evil power and the soul belongs elsewhere, rejected the Catholic sacraments, and centred their practice on a single rite of laying on of hands administered near death or on entry into full membership.

How coherent the movement actually was is now genuinely contested. One line of scholarship treats it as an organised church with bishops and a transmitted eastern dualism; another argues that the coherence is largely an artefact of the records, which were produced by inquisitors working from a template of what heresy was supposed to look like.

What is not in doubt is the response. In 1209 a crusade was preached against Christians in Christian territory, an innovation in itself, and twenty years of war followed that destroyed the political independence of the Occitan south and attached it to the French crown. The inquisitorial procedure developed to find survivors afterwards became the model for later institutions of the same kind, so the campaign shaped the machinery of the western church well beyond the region.