Please enable JavaScript.
Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.
ROPS Week 8- The Albigensian Crusade and the War against Heresy…
ROPS Week 8- The Albigensian Crusade and the War against Heresy
Heretics in Albi in Languedoc- ‘Cathars’- label historians have used
Crusaders told to kill everyone- Heretics and Catholics
Significance of the Albigensian Crusade
‘One of the most conclusive cases of genocide in religious history’- Raphael Lemkin
‘Ushered genocide into the West, changing forever what it meant to be Christian. It redefined Christendom itself.’- Mark Pegg
Pre-requisite to the Inquisition- Voltaire
Not a response to a problem. The persecution finds a reason for itself- heresy wasn’t that big a threat
Pope sees himself as a temporal and a spiritual authority- in charge of secular aspects and kings as well as religion- crown emperors
Supposed to be an age of faith, but not necessarily an age of credulity and ignorance
Popular Religion
Saints
Pilgrimages
Relics
Cult of the Virgin
Varieties of Heresy
The ‘Spirituals’ of the Franciscans
Dualism- belief in two gods
‘The Waldensians’- emphasis on poverty and preaching- New Testament
Valdo and 'the Poor of Lyons'- 1173
The ‘Cathars’ in Occitan/Languedoc- c.1150-1300s
Anti-Clericalism- hostility to clerics
The ‘Good Men’ and the perfecti
‘Consolamen’= ’heretication’
Why Languedoc? – lack of strong, central authority- sympathetic nobility (Raymond VI, Count of Toulouse), tradition of religious tolerance
The Catholic Church's Response
The Inquisition 1233- The Dominican Order
The ‘Compassionate Persecutor’- heresy and ‘soul murder’
Early efforts at persuasion 1206-7- preaching and public debates
‘Holy War’- The Cathars and the Albigensian Crusade
Dualism- survival from Antiquity- spread through Balkans in medieval period- become part of Byzantine Empire- established in Constantinople- merchants and traders carried Dualism to Europe
Moore
- ‘a whole range of ‘deviants’ are being targeted by a bureaucratic elite of clerics whose own claims to authority rest upon identifying and punishing outsiders’
Moore
- ‘A ‘persecuting society’? persecution is habitual…and directed through established government, judicial and social institutions…’
Albigensian Crusade (1209-15)
Crusaders lose control of territory
Simon de Montford killed at Toulouse 1218
Simon de Montford V, Peter II of Aragon- Battle of Muret 1213
Louis VIII/Blanche of Castille of France leads new Crusade into the South, 1226-1229
20,000 killed at Beziers ‘kill them all! God will know his own!’
Treaty of Paris 1229
Raymond V of Toulouse- main target
Military operations begin in 1209
Declared by Pope Innocent III in 1208
Heresy greatly feared as a real danger- loads of measures created for detection and suppression- war against heretics held to be permissible as against unbelievers (
R.I. Moore, ‘The War against Heresy in Medieval Europe’, Historical Research 81 (2008)
)