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The Albigensian Crusade was a Crusade against the people of the Languedoc which began in 1208. It is also known as the Cathar Crusade. Like all crusades it was a war, declared by the Pope, ( Innocent III), backed by the Roman Church with promises of remission of sins and a guaranteed place in heaven. Why is it called the Albigensian Crusade rather than the Cathar Crusade? In order to answer this, it is important to remember that Cathar is only of many names the Roman Church invented for members of this particular brand of Gnostic Dualism. Among many other names, they were called Albigensians, from the (probably erroneous) belief that they were concentrated in the town of Albi. The term Cathar has become the standard term for them only in recent times. The term Albigensian Crusade (or Cathar Crusade, or Cathar Wars) is used loosely to describe a series of formal Crusades, interspersed with continual warfare against the people of the Languedoc which lasted for some forty years. |
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The target of the Crusade was Raymond V of Toulouse and his vassals, but Raymond joined the Crusade himself. This meant that he and his vessels came under the protection of the Church. That is why the first stages of the Crusade were directed against Béziers and Carcassonne, which did not belong to Raymond of Toulouse, but to a close relative Ramon-Roger Trencavel The trick did not work for long, and soon Raymond was excommunicated and his castles were under attack. After the initial sieges of Béziers and Carcassonne, the (mainly French) Crusader forces were led by Simon de Montfort and later his son Amery de Montfort, who were responsible for series of bloody battles, sieges and massacres. Voltaire wrote about this crusade against the people of the languedoc. Click on the following link for an English translation by the webmaster. |
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We now think of the Languedoc as part of France, but it is important to remember that the reality was very different in the thirteenth century. Local chronicles invariably refer to the foreign crusaders as The French, for the very good reason that the chroniclers did not consider themselves or their countrymen as French and neither did anyone else. Even the French chroniclers refer to themselves as "foreigners" in the Languedoc.
The Crusades are conventionally held to have ended in 1244
with the fall of the Château
of Montségur (
Montsegùr),
though Cathars were still being burned alive into the fourteenth
century. An Inquisition
was founded to extirpate the last vestiges of Cathar belief.
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to: Where did Catharism come from ?
