During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries Languedoc In southern France was the centre of a rich and complex religious life In which both Christian orthodoxy and heresy flourished. William of Puylaurens, the thirteenth-century chronicler of the region, reported heretic communities of Arlans, Waldenslans and Manichaeans. The Arlans were the survival of that 900-year-old heresy that began In Alexandria and tended towards undermining the divinity of Jesus Christ, while the Waldenslans were a new twelfth-century movement that espoused poverty, called for the distribution of property to the poor, rejected the authority of the clergy and claimed that anyone could preach, saying their literal reading of the Bible was all that was needed for salvation. According to Peter of Los Vauz do Cernay, another thirteenth-century chronicler, the Waldensians ‘were evil men, but very much less perverted than other heretics; they agreed with us in many matters, and differed in some’. The ‘other heretics’ were the Manichaeans, also known as Cathars, meaning ‘pure’.
Languedoc was a major source of Templar income and recruits. The Templars partly owed their great expansion in the region to the support of the nobility with whom they were in close alliance, the combination of nobles’ land and Templar capital allowing the establishment of new communities and the development of previously uncultivated territories. Some of these Templar patrons were renowned Cathar supporters.
Catharism first appeared in southern France sometime in the years following the First Crusade. Its adherents quickly became numerous and well organised, electing bishops, collecting funds and distributing money to the poor. But they could not accept that if there was only one God, and if God was the creator, and if God was good, that there should be suffering, illness and death in his world. The Cathars’ solution to this problem of evil in the world was to say there were really two creators and two worlds. The Cathars were dualists in that they believed in a good and an evil principle, the former the creator of the invisible and spiritual universe, the latter the creator of our material world. All matter was evil because It was the creation of the devil, but the Ideal of renouncing the world was Impractical for everyone, and so while most Cathars lived outwardly normal lives, pledging to renounce the evil world only on their deathbeds, a few lived the strict life of the perfect!.
Because human and animal procreation perpetuated matter, the perfect! abstained from eggs, milk, meat and women. But both ordinary Cathars and the perfect! actively shared In their bellefthat Christ was not part of this world of evil. Therefore he was not truly born of the Virgin Mary, nor had he human flesh, nor had he risen from the dead; salvation did not He In his death and resurrection, which were merely a simulation; Instead redemption would be gained by following Jesus’ teachings.
By 1200 the Cathar heresy had become so widespread that the Papacy was alarmed. Pope Innocent III said that the Cathars were ‘worse than the Saracens’, for not only did Catharism challenge the Church but by condemning procreation It threatened the very survival of the human race. In 1209 a crusade was launched against them-the Albigenslan Crusade, as so many Cathars lived around Albl-and an Inquisition was Introduced. In that year the core of Cathar resistance withdrew to the castle of Montsegur atop a great domed hill In the eastern Pyrenees, where they withstood assaults and sieges until capitulating In 1244. Some two hundred still refused to abjure their errors, were bound together within a stockade below the castle and were set ablaze on a huge funeral pyre. The
Templars played no part In the Albigenslan Crusade, which was bound to attack some of their own patrons, who were likewise patrons of the Cathars.
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