Early Warnings Against the Cathars

Canon 27 of the council addressed a problem that would not be resolved by preaching alone: the spread of Cathar and Waldensian belief through Languedoc and neighboring regions of southern France, described in the canon under the general heading of heretics variously known as Cathars, Patarines or by other names. The council authorized secular rulers to seize the property of those who sheltered or supported such groups and offered a partial indulgence, comparable to that granted for pilgrimage to the Holy Land, to those who took up arms against them, a provision that anticipated by exactly thirty years the fuller papal call to crusade Innocent III would issue against the same region in 1209.

The canon's language reflects a church that saw the problem clearly but had not yet developed the institutional machinery, an organized inquisition, to address it directly, relying instead on the cooperation of local lords and bishops who often had their own reasons to tolerate the very communities the council was asking them to suppress. That gap between what the council authorized and what actually happened on the ground in Languedoc over the following decades is part of what made the later, much larger military campaign under Innocent III and Simon de Montfort appear necessary to Rome.