Individuals of questionable orthodoxy as well as heretical sects could be found scattered throughout much of early thirteenth-century Europe. Paris in 1210 saw the burning of the pantheistic Amalricians, while Strasbourg a year or two later witnessed a greater conflagration, perhaps of the obscure Ortliebians. When the Stedinger peasants of northern Germany refused to pay their tithes to the archbishop of Bremen, they were declared heretical; Pope Gregory IX, who believed they were Luciferians, authorized the crusade which crushed them in 1234. Such
Pockets of heresy, however, did not constitute a major threat to the Church.
What worried a pope like Innocent III (11981216) was the danger of large concentrations of religious deviants existing in the midst of Catholic communities, while remaining relatively free to evangelize. The Cathars or Albigensians were dualists who had their own Church. Their holy men and women—known as the perfect—were actively proselytizing from the Pyrenees to the Papal State, almost to the outskirts of Rome. Also, the Poor Men of Lyon or Waldensians, laymen whose main heresy was to insist upon preaching the Gospel despite ecclesiastical prohibition, were gaining adherents in southern France and in the Lombard cities. The Waldensians and Cathars were opposed to one another, but they intermingled in southern Europe and, to an extent, in northern Europe as well. There were other heresies; but these were the most formidable. The last Cathar perfect was burnt as late as 1321. The Waldensians of the Piedmont survived until the Reformation.
The stronghold of the Cathars or Albigensians was in the lands of the count of Toulouse in south-west France. Here, because the heretics were so deeply entrenched in Languedocian society, the Church could not persuade or compel the secular nobility to suppress them on its behalf. Nor was the king of France, Philip II Augustus, willing to act. After the murder of his legate Peter of Castelnau in 1208, Pope Innocent III launched a crusade against the heretics and their supporters—a holy war for peace (against the mercenary rentiers) and for the faith (against the heretical Albigensians). It was led by papal legates like the Cistercian abbot Arnold Aimery and the northern French baron Simon de Montfort. Towns were sacked, Cathar perfecti were massacred and lands were confiscated by the northerners. The crusade continued intermittently through the first half of the thirteenth century, although Catharism was by no means eradicated. In 1271, Languedoc passed to the French Crown. The Capetians were the crusade's ultimate beneficiaries.
While the Albigensian crusade was still in progress in 1212, Innocent III threatened the Milanese with a crusading army if they failed to repress the heretics in their city. Yet the crusade was a blunt instrument. The Inquisition was potentially more selective. Traditionally, it was the bishop's job to detect heretics within his diocese. Now specialists were needed. The Franciscan and especially the Dominican friars brought theological expertise and religious zeal to their task. The career of the Dominican Inquisitor, Robert le Bougre, active between c. 1232 and 1239, culminated in that year with the mass auto da fe of Cathars at Mont-Aime in Champagne. The secular priest Conrad of Marburg was similarly relentless in his pursuit of Waldensians, Cathars and (alleged) Luciferians in the mid-Rhineland from c. 1227 until his assassination in 1233. The pope who had commissioned them both, Gregory IX (1227-41), established the Inquisition in Languedoc in 1233. Inquisitors were then based at Toulouse, Montpellier and Albi; at Narbonne there was already a Dominican Inquisitor, an appointee of the archbishop. Fixed inquisitorial tribunals in Italy also date from Gregory IX's pontificate; they become more plentiful thereafter. Particularly effective was the Inquisition of the dead. For a deceased testator to be found guilty of heresy meant that his heirs forfeited their estate. Property proved a powerful stimulus for orthodoxy.
G. Dickson
World History
