Heretics

Heretical movements, though relatively rare in the medieval Christian West, occurred sporadically in the eleventh century and then more noticeably in the twelfth and thirteenth. Some were localized and ephemeral, like the quasi-Gnostic movement among the cathedral clergy of Orleans in 1022. Longer lasting were Catharism, a dualistic form of Christianity, which viewed all created matter as evil and which probably spread from the Byzantine Empire into Italy and south-west France, perhaps as early as the early eleventh century, and Waldensianism, an anticlerical form of Christianity originating as a movement of lay piety led by a merchant of Lyon called Waldes. Catharism and Waldensianism, even at their peak, attracted relatively few supporters across Europe as a whole. In the mid-twelfth century Catharism won support among weavers in towns in north-eastern France and the Rhineland, but faded in these areas after the ii6os.

It lasted much longer around Toulouse, and in some northern Italian towns, particularly where it managed to win over some of the upper classes. Strictly observant Cathars (‘perfects’) were heavily outnumbered by the rest of the population. Nonetheless, they were influential among their neighbours. Their existence caused anxiety in the ecclesiastical hierarchy, which feared that its authority was being undermined. Several of the south-western French bishops were too ineffectual to offer opposition, however, and action at first came from the Cistercians, who sent members of their order on preaching missions. These had little effect; more successful was the preaching of Dominic of Osma and his early followers in the early thirteenth century. The Albigensian Crusade (1209-29) did not kill off Catharism and in the 1230s the Dominicans, with the support of the Church hierarchy, set up the Inquisition. Among the Catholic laity, Cathars aroused a wide range of reactions: hostility, sometimes strengthened by a desire to profit from their misadventures (as in the case of the northern French nobility on the Albigensian Crusade), neutrality, and passive approval. Several noble families in south-western France contained both Cathars and Catholics, the latter often shielding the former. Cathars had to behave with extreme circumspection, since their behaviour—for example, reluctance to eat meat—might mark them out. This was especially true of those who had committed themselves fully to the religion and become ‘perfects’. These were venerated by ordinary Cathar believers and were sought after as preachers and as the only people who could offer the consolamen-tum*, a form of deathbed sacrament. Male perfects travelled to preach, while female perfects tended to live in small households together or with female believers, rather like small communities of nuns. The Inquisition steadily made it harder for perfects to operate in southern France, and in the 1250s they fled to Italy, but here too Cathar communities, even in small towns like Desenzano on Lake Garda, were persecuted into extinction in the late thirteenth century.