. Name given to the series of military campaigns that began in the spring of 1209 as part of the effort to eradicate the Cathar heresy, an important center of which was the town of Albi in southern France.
France’s Languedoc and Midi regions, together with northern Italy, had long offered fertile ground to religious heterodoxy. Geography played a key role in this. These regions’ traditional involvement in the diverse cultural, commerical, and intellectual life of the Mediterranean exposed them to a steady stream of new religious and philosophical thought; and their relative lack of, or freedom from, an effective centralized political authority, a situation owing much to the disjointed topography of the territories, made it easy for dissenting ideas to take root. Not only did none of the established religious or civil authorities have the de facto power to suppress heresy when it appeared, but their very inability to exert that power inevitably inspired many local inhabitants to question the de jure authority of their supposed leaders. In a world where popular belief in such things as a “pure” river’s inability to receive the “corrupt” body of an accused criminal (the underlying assumption behind trials by ordeal), the failure to exert power made it easier for people to doubt the validity of the authority in whose name that power was supposedly levied.
Heretical movements appeared in southern France as early as 1120, but an identifiable Catharism cannot be detected until the 1140s and 1150s. Despite its rigors, Catharism appealed to all social levels, including the nobility in Languedoc, and to men and women alike. Its fast-growing popularity led the church to organize episcopally directed preaching missions, and the Third Lateran Council in 1179 enjoined all believers to give their bishops aid in the struggle to root out the heresy, including physical force. But force was not used at once. Instead, preachers like St. Dominic and his followers were dispatched, courts of inquiry (the early Inquisition) were established, and ineffective or corrupt bishops were deposed. By 1204, however, Pope Innocent III decided that stronger measures were needed and called upon the Capetian king Philip II Augustus to take arms against the rebels. Philip demurred, citing his current difficulties with King John of England, and matters came to a standstill as papal energies were drawn to the tangled affairs of the Fourth Crusade then getting underway in Venice.
On January 14, 1208, however, a papal legate in Languedoc was murdered, and suspicion fell upon the count of Toulouse, Raymond VI, widely reputed to have Catharist sympathies. Innocent proclaimed a crusade against the heretics, whom he regarded as a worse threat to Christendom than even the Muslims, and against their protectors and those who tolerated the presence of heterodoxy. By the spring of 1209, a large army had convened, drawn from across Europe. Raymond of Toulouse submitted to the church and underwent a penitential scourging, but others fared worse. The viscount of Beziers and Carcassonne, who was also lord of the territory surrounding Albi, saw his lands invaded and his subjects fiercely cut down. Simon de Montfort, a middling baron from the Ile-de-France and a leader of the crusade, took command of the Trencavel lands and turned Beziers into the base from which annual campaigns against the remaining heretics were launched.
Political and strategic matters quickly became complicated. Raymond of Toulouse’s failure to fulfill his penitential vows drew Simon’s angry attention, and when he directed the crusade against Toulouse throughout 1211 and 1212 Simon found himself battling the king of Aragon, who had come to the aid of Raymond, his brother-in-law. This king, Peter the Catholic, was at that time one of Christendom’s great champions, having played a role in the decisive Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa against the Muslims of Spain, which had effectively broken the power of the Islamic princes over the bulk of the peninsula, and his opposition to Simon gave the pope an excuse to abolish the crusade privileges bestowed upon those fighting the Cathars. Innocent by this time wanted desperately to raise soldiers for another crusade to the Holy Land and felt that the drawn-out Cathar affair undermined his hopes. Simon, however, defeated Peter at the Battle of Muret in September 1213, leaving the Aragonese ruler dead on the field and the crusading army in control of most of Raymond’s lands in southern France.
The towns of the region, regardless of their religious attitudes, then rebelled against Simon’s growing authority, which they viewed as an unwarranted abrogation of their traditional independence. When Simon was killed in a skirmish outside Toulouse in 1218, few mourned. The new pope, Honorius III, restored crusader privileges to those involved in the fight against the Cathars but with little result. Matters remained stalemated until 1226, when King Louis VIII of France led his own crusading force southward, as much in the hope of securing a Capetian outlet to the Mediterranean as out of a desire to defend orthodoxy. The Treaty of Meaux-Paris, signed in early 1229, formally ended the
Albigensian Crusade by restoring the Toulousan count (Raymond VII, by this time) to at least part of his lands and by establishing a Capetian foothold in the south. Catharism itself, however, survived well into the 14 th century, especially in remoter towns and villages.
The Albigensian Crusade showed the impotence of crusading as a solution for deeply rooted heresy and pointed the way to the need for a different sort of response—the Inquisition. The ways in which political and dynastic concerns affected crusader efforts, usually for the worse, were also amply illustrated; and the crusade’s most lasting consequence was the effective halting of Catalan claims of overlordship north of the Pyrenees and the establishment of Capetian power throughout Languedoc, the Midi, and eventually Provence.
Clifford R. Backman
[See also: AGENAIS; ALBI; BEZIERS; CATHARS; DOMINICAN ORDER; HERESY; INQUISITION; LOUIS VIII; MONTFORT; MURET; TRENCAVEL]
Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel. Montaillou: Catholics and Cathars in a French Village, 1294-1324, trans. Barbara Bray. London: Scolar, 1978.
Mundy, John H. The Repression of Catharism at Toulouse: The Royal Diploma of1279. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1985.
Roquebert, Michel. L 'epopee cathare: 1198-1212. 3 vols. Toulouse: Privat, 1970-86.
Strayer, Joseph Rees. The Albigensian Crusade. New York: Dial, 1971.
Wakefield, Walter L. Heresy, Crusade and Inquisition in Southern France, 1100-1250. London: Allen and Unwin, 1974.
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