The Rest Is History - 302: The Mystery of the Cathars

Episode Date: February 7, 2023

Was the Catholic Church Europe’s first revolutionary group? How are the Cathars linked to the genesis of genocide? Where does the term crusade come from? Listen as Tom and Dominic discuss the real history around the mysterious group known as the Cathars. *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and religious intolerance. A warning and a lesson from the past, always worth telling. Except, of course, that none of it is true. So that was Mark Gregory Pegg in A Most Holy War, The Albigensian Crusade and the Battle for Christendom, the story of the Cathars. And Tom, you ended our last episode, renowned historian Tom Holland, with that quotation.

We discussed the book The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. We talked about the Holy Blood of fantasists and con artists and hoaxers whose fake manuscripts and stories of buried treasure and buried bloodlines ultimately all flowed into the success of dan brown's the da vinci code and behind it all is the story of this shadowy secretive sort of shadow church i suppose yeah, called the Cathars in the Middle Ages. And you ended by with that quotation effectively saying that it's not just that the conspiracy theories from the novels are not true, but that a lot of the history may not even be true. Well, specifically, histories that were written in the 70s through to the beginning of the 21st

century, and that in a sense, they are kind of highbrow versions of the Da Vinci Code, that both of them are recycling conspiracy theories that are not actually true. So just to sort of, as an incredibly accessible sort of summary, for those people who are completely ignorant of all this, the standard view that you would find in a sort of encyclopedia or something if i looked up the cathars yeah well or wikipedia i mean it's still very much there on what would it what would it tell us who are they and where and so it would say that the cathars are a kind of shadowy counter church in the middle ages that they are based in uh longadoc the midi south of france that they are dualist in In other words, they believe that there is a kind of malign God and a good God, that matter is evil and that spirit is good, that these are ideas that derive from ancient heresies, that they are part of a living tradition that went underground in the Byzantine Empire, that in the 11th and 12th centuries passed from byzantium to bulgaria and a set called the

bogomils who then had missionaries who came to the west and they seeded this church and that these people were called cathars this is this is who they were and that they were part of a kind of wider organized european wide kind of church of of heretics and that this then precipitates that the existence of this cathar church precipitates in the beginning of the 13th century the first crusade to be targeted against people within the fabric of christendom rather than beyond it yeah and that over the course of the 13th and 14th century all traces of the cathar church are wiped out both by military campaigning and then after that by the action of inquisitors and by the middle of the 14th century the catholic church has vanished and by

and and by the way that's not not just the the version that you see on wikipedia or in encyclopedias i mean we were talking in the last episode about both of us have been i mean independently of each other i might add to the long dock to see the castles and the sites. And the tourist board massively pushes this. I mean, this is Cathar country, Cathar castles. It's pay Cathar, Cathar country. Yes, exactly. Exactly.

So, I mean, so it seems kind of astonishing that a historian could say that none of it is true. And before I go on to say about why this might be the case, two things to make clear. The first is that by the standards of the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages, there absolutely were heretics in the long dock. There were people who by the standards of the Catholic inquisitors ranked as heretics. And the second is that the crusade, I mean, clearly is unspeakably brutal. So Mark Gregory Pegg, who I was quoting, I mean, he describes it actually as the genesis of an entire tradition of genocide within Western history. So it's not that he is downplaying it in any way. But basically, there are two things

he argues and other historians are increasingly arguing that the standard accounts get wrong. The first is that the word Cathar is a misnomer. There were no people who identified themselves as Cathars or who were identified by the Catholic Church as Cathars in Languedoc. So people didn't even use the word? So we've come to where does the word Cathar, how does it come to be used in a minute? But the other thing is that there was no dualist heresy. It did not have roots reaching back into antiquity. It did not come from Byzantium. It did not come from Bulgaria. And it was not part of a wider organized heretic church.

None of those things are true. When you say dualist heresy, so that's the idea that there are two gods? Is it? Or God and the devil? There are two gods and it's matter and spirit. Yes, exactly. So kind of ultimately it's a Persian idea. Manicheanism yes mani who was a prophet who preached this idea that the world was divided by rival gods each

representing matter and spirit evil and good and this is what the the cathars believe that none of that is true none of that is true so where does the word cathar come from? And I will quote another extremely distinguished historian on this. And this is historian R.I. Moore, Bob Moore, who he wrote a fantastic book called Europe's First Revolution about the 11th century and its aftermath. I would say he's not just one of Britain's greatest medieval historians, he's one of Britain's greatest historians, full stop. And he wrote a fantastic book called The War on Heresy. It came out, I think, in 2014. And it is described on the cover as startling, unsettling and revelatory by a top podcaster. Namely myself. I was going to say, is it Al Murray? So it's a really eye-opening book. And I still remember the kind of, you know, when you read a work of history and it gives you a kind of intellectual thrill yeah absolutely a bit like the da vinci code but in a

very very you know different plateau but it's a kind of you read it you think i can't quite believe this but actually it all makes sense it's really really exciting it's one of those books i read a book called when montezuma met cortez by a guy called matthew restall and and i think it's the same thing it's a one of those books that basically says, the narrative that you have been reading all your life is wrong. And here is why. And it's a wonderful feeling as a historian to read a book like that. It is.

So it's a bit like when I was 12 and I read The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail. I didn't know any better. I was kind of completely convinced by it. I was kind of convinced by Moore's book, The War on Heresy, because, you know, he is one of the great historians of the Middle Ages. And so you know that you're in safe hands with him. And I will now read what he says about the use of the word Cathar and the fact that there was such a thing as Cathars in the period. Among the many obstacles, Moore writes, placed in the way of this account by fun-hating historians, so namely himself and Pegg. The simplest, though one of the most recently articulated, is that nobody in the 13th century pei kathar, so the kathar country, accused or

accuser, actually used the word kathar. It does not occur in the large body of letters and sermons denouncing heresy in the region from the middle of the 12th century in the records of the region's inquisitions, or indeed in any medieval source directly from it. So basically, it just wasn't used there. Right. Yes. How come historians are using it? And the answer to that is that it's used in the middle of the 19th century by a French Protestant historian called Charles Schmitt, who publishes a book in 1849 that uses the word Qatar in the title. He was a very great scholar. I mean, hugely influential on the study of this whole kind of field and area. But it's still not being widely used by historians until really the post-war period. So it starts to be used in France, very much around the time that

Plantard is starting, you know, who we talked about in the previous episode, is starting to make up his stuff about the Priory of Zion. This is a kind of posh, you know, academic equivalent. The French scholars are starting to use the word Qatar, and then it starts to be used by historians who are writing in English from the 70s onwards. At about the time where people are becoming really interested in the conspiracy theories but also in academia people are being really interested in sort of marginal yes stories so in other words and that's it got a time i mean i know this is a strange link but that's got a tiny hint of the conspiracy theory about it in the sense that historians are sort of saying, now, the standard narrative of the great

and the good that you've been told all your lives is wrong, and we are uncovering hidden histories. I mean, uncovering hidden histories is what conspiracy theorists claim to do. So there is a kind of symbiosis there. Yes, but there are conspiracy theories, and the conspiracy theories are not just originating with, you know, lunatics or indeed academics in the late 20th century. Same thing, surely. It's originating from the Middle Ages themselves. Okay. So the word Cathar is being used in the Middle Ages and indeed long before the Middle Ages. So it's a Greek word.

So katharoi means the pure ones, or you might say the Puritans. So they're mentioned in a canon. So one of the kind of the statements that's issued by the Council of Nicaea, and the Council of Nicaea is convened by Constantine the Great, so the first Christian emperor. And this is, they come up with the creed, the Orthodox creed. And the Cathars are described as one of the group of heretics who are condemned. And then no one makes any more mention of them.

So they vanish from the record for almost a thousand years. And then in 1163 in Cologne, six men and two women are burned as heretics and they are described as Cathars. So that is a very, very long gap. That's a huge gap. It's a huge gap. And so from that point on, in the writings of bishops and so on, you start to get mention of heretics who are called Cathars, and they're identified here and there across Christendom, never in great and then in 1173 a great council the third council to be held in the lateran palace in rome where the pope is based and you get people at

prelates um monks scholars coming from across europe to meet in rome and they're all bringing their reports and they're discussing heresy and they identify the existence of a single body of heretics who are in the words of one of the decrees of the Lateran Council, this third Lateran Council, whom some call Cathars, others Paterines and others by different names. So there are two obvious questions from all this. And the first is, are the Cathars who suddenly appear in Cologne in the mid 12th century, the same as the heretics condemned in the early fourth century? Because that's basically the argument that is being, you know, that is being made when you say that there is this living tradition that derives from antiquity that went underground in Byzantium, came through Bulgaria and was brought by missionaries. Which is a kind of more respectable version of the Priory of Zion or the... Exactly so. And that's what's so interesting about it. It is. And it's implausible with the

Priory of Zion. And I think it's implausible in this case. I was about to say, the answer to that question is surely no, they cannot be the same. And the other thing that you have, of course, with the Priory of Zion is this idea of a conspiracy that is not centred in one place, but spans the whole of Europe. Isaac Newton, Don Revy, Les Dawson, you know, they're all in it. You have people from, you know, you have da Vinci, Victor Hugo, Isaac Newton. Yes. So people from across Europe. And in the same way, what the prelates at the Third Lateran Council are doing are saying there is a universal church, that all of these heretics are joined. I mean, again, it seems improbable. It seems much likelier that this is something that is being projected.

Yes. So when all these people meet up in the Lateran Council, they're all comparing notes and they'll go, yeah, they're all part of the same organisation. But it's actually very clear that there is confusion among the accusers as to who or what Cathars are. So there is a German monk who claims that their name derives from the cat that devotees of Satan were reputed to kiss on its anus. Oh my word. Yeah. So you become a worshipper of satan and you you kiss the bottom of a cat a great black cat are people doing that in large numbers i don't believe it i think it's improbable and so the implication of that is that actually the the cathars are so obscure that only

the very very learned know who they are and the antiquity of them is the point so by kind of name-checking cathars you are showing off how how intellectual you are how learned you are how scholarly you are yeah and this this period the 12th century is when universities are starting to appear so this is where you get people whose job it is basically to sit in universities and study this stuff and suddenly they're saying you know they're reading up about the Cathars in ancient tomes and suddenly they're discovering them, you know, on the Rhine or in Northern Italy or whatever.

And what is even better, Tom, is that they are saying, well, it's very complicated to explain. If you know, you know, and if you don't know, well, you're obviously not intelligent enough to understand. Yeah. So basically what is it? It's the kind of, you know, it's the literate elite, the scholarly elite, university educated people who are basically constructing the idea of a universal heretical church that spans Christendom and reaches back to the distant mists of the church's beginnings. And it seems likelier that

they are making it up than that this this church actually exists right so in other words it's it's you know like all conspiracy theories it's telling you less about what is actually happening than about the people who are coming who are bringing it up okay so tell us about the people who are bringing it up then so these are these are people who want to see themselves as the representatives of a completely unchanging church so the catholic church is something that has existed since the time of christ it's unchanging it embodies eternal doctrines internal teachings eternal truths and convers its enemy, the shadow of heresy, likewise, is something unchanging and something universal. However, the fact is that for most of

the early Middle Ages, the church is not going after heretics. There are no heretics. And they start to appear in the 11th century. Suddenly, in the 11th century, charges of heresy are starting to be brought, and people in the church are starting to become worried about heresy. And what is the process, you know, what is happening that is making this change happen? And the irony is, as I said at the end of the last episode, that there are Cathars, and they're in full view. The Cathars are the people who have taken charge of the commanding heights of the Catholic Church, because a Cathar is someone who is, you know, said it's a Puritan, someone who wants to be pure. And this in the 11th century becomes the great goal, the great object of reformers in the Catholic Church, that they want to cleanse and purify the whole fabric of Christendom, of the taint of sin. That it's not just individual believers, you have to be baptised and washed clean. The whole fabric of Christendom does. And this desire to cleanse and purify Christendom, it's a kind of progressive ambition to make the

Christian people better, nobler, to fulfill God's purpose more completely. In the 11th century, this precipitates what R.I. Moore, Bob Moore, who I mentioned, written this great book, The War on Heresy, describes as Europe's first revolution. And it's a revolution that it's called either the papal revolution or the Gregorian revolution after the Pope Gregory VII, who is most kind of closely associated with this process. And it's an incredibly convulsive experience, not just for the church, but for the whole of Europe, because it requires people who are reluctant to accept this kind of campaigning idea that the whole of Christendom should be transformed and cleansed. It requires them to

be kind of whipped into shape. So that famously includes kings and emperors so gregory the seventh you know he he has the emperor himself henry the fourth kneel in the snows beneath his castle at canossa and beg for forgiveness and this kind of great convulsive process whereby the roman church is trying to break the power of kings to essentially appropriate everything that is the dimension of the supernatural into their own hands. And this is the kind of the process that results in universities, because you need kind of literate, clerical people who can articulate and carry through the ambitions of this revolutionary program. And that's how universities, you know, Bologna or Oxford or whatever. So Bologna, the first one, it begins as a kind of great centre of legal students because they're trying to construct frameworks of law that can govern this new kind of Christian understanding of what the Christian world should be.

And also it generates what will come to be called crusades because the church needs defenders and it needs to propagate. It's, you know, it's a missionary faith, like all the revolutions that will follow it. It believes in the totality of its vision and it needs to be propagated if needs be at the point of a sword. And so it's a very, very convulsive experience, a transformative experience. It's the primal experience of revolution in European history. And, you. And it's not Lenin or Rose Pierre or Luther who stands at the primal head of the revolutionary tradition in Europe. It's Gregory VII and the reformers around him. These are the primal revolutionaries. So the Catholic Church in the 11th, 12th, 13th century, in the period that we're talking about, when the Cathars are supposed to have existed, this is a revolutionary institution. But from above.

Absolutely. A bit like, it's a stupid comparison, but Mao's Cultural Revolution or something. A revolution. Kind of above and kind of not. And this is where we get back to heresy and the Cathars. So you remember in the Third Lateran Council, 1173, you get this description of heretics whom some call Cathars, others Paterines, and others by different names. So who are the Paterines? So the Paterines take us exactly to all the ambivalences and complexities of this process. So the Paterines are radical Christians in radical Christians in Milan in the mid 11th century who are basically street reformers. They are people who are opposed to the bishop of Milan own poverty, their ascetic, and they're vigorously insistent that

the bishop and his clergy should be celibate, that celibacy should be the marker of their purity, of the fact that they are becoming, you know, Catharoi, Cathars. And this is exactly what Gregory VII, as he will become, Hildebrand, as he was called at this point. This is what he wants as well. And so basically, he forms an alliance with these patterines. Patterine comes from the name of the rag market in Milan. These are people who are absolutely from the streets, but it's an alliance of the top and the bottom for the would-be reformers in Rome with these kind of street reformers in Milan. And they are, you know, these violent demands that priests set themselves apart from the laity, that they do that through

rejecting sex, through casting aside their concubines, all these kinds of things. And Gregory goes into alliance with them, the reformers go into alliance with them, because it's their ambition to kind of undermine the legitimacy of bishops and clergy who are opposing them. So they're using these people to kind of break. against the people in the middle. Yes, and for reasons that perhaps, you know, at the end of this series you might touch on as to where exactly all this ends up. So this is going on in the 11th century. It's this kind of process whereby the papal reformers are in alliance with very radical Christians, Christians who see priests as corrupt,

who are embracing poverty, embracing chastity, performing kind of miracles, you know, out in the fields, out are embracing poverty, embracing chastity, performing kind of miracles, you know, out in the fields, out in the streets, and who are being hailed as people, you know, for their holiness outside the structures of the church. But by the 12th century, the revolution is starting to succeed. And so the reformers have begun to capture the institutions that previously they'd been busy undermining. And so now, now that they have captured the bishoprics, now that they've enforced chastity on the clergy, now that they're kind of managing to get kings and emperors to accept this kind of new dispensation, now the authority of the clergy and the bishops and the priests is really important.

And so the patrines now have become a problem. And so they, you know, in the 11th century, they'd been useful, but now they've become a problem. And so, you know, by the end of the 12th century, they're being identified as heretics. So the 12th century and the way in which heresy, what is called heresy, emerges in the 12th century is actually a reflection of something that we see in every revolution that has happened since which is that once revolutionary elites have seized control of the commanding heights and and basically become the new elite yes the new establishment then they they always face two blocks of opponents and one of those is those who think the revolution hasn't gone far enough so the extremists the military extremists of whom the patrines would be an example

the fact that you know there's still corruption the priests still need to be kept on their toes. So they are a problem. And of course, the other people, the block of people, are those who've been left behind. What Hillary Clinton might call the deplorables. Yes. Right, the gamins. The gamins. Exactly, the gamins.

And so this is why you have an upsurge of heresy in the 11th and the 12th century, is that it's the church that is the radical and the revolutionary institution, but it is redefining its opponents, both those who feel that the revolution hasn't gone far enough and those who've been left behind as heretics. Right. Yes. And so since you're having these universities that initially are being set up to study law, but increasingly they move to Paris and Oxford and so on, they are they're kind of preparing clerics for this much more kind of institutionalized world where the power of the church is much, much more coherent and kings need clerics and all this kind of stuff. So you're having more and more people who are familiar with the writings of the church fathers and the canons of the church and so on. And so they are looking back to the early history of the church for archetypes of heresy. And what they're finding there are dualists and Gnostics and Cathars and all these kinds of various people. And so the more they're looking for them, the more they spook themselves, and the more anxious they become about the existence of these supposedly ancient heretics who derive their teachings from, you know, in a lineal descent from ancient heretics and are a kind of universal church. They become more and more kind of paranoid about it. And so initially, in the 11th and 12th centuries, the church approached

heretics in a kind of very gingery way, because a bit like witchcraft hunters in the 17th century, you know, they're aware that the evidence for it is often quite difficult to pin down, and they're not kind of entirely certain about it. But by the time you have this third Lateran Council, where it's, you know, identifying Cathars and Patarines as a kind of universal church, they're becoming much more proactive. So in 1184, you get a papal decree that requires bishops not just to wait for accusations against heretics, but actually to go out and look for them, to kind of sniff them out, to hunt them down. And the figure who is most momentously associated with this development is perhaps the greatest of all the medieval popes, certainly the most powerful. The pope who places England under interdiction, you know, excommunicates John, a pope called Innocent III. And he is pope from 1198 through to 1216. So in other words, the period when the crusade

against the supposed heretics in the Lankadok will be launched. And Innocent III, so he describes himself as below God, but above man, less than God, but greater than man, who judges all things, but who no one judges. And he is obsessed by two things he's obsessed by cathars he's always going on about them he's worried that cathars are everywhere kind of breeding so in two respects tom he's like you in what way high opinion of himself no that's not me thinks he's above other people but no one judges and obsessed by cathars you've been trying to you've been wanting to do this podcast for years yeah i have okay so in the obsession with cathars i accept that.

So he's obsessed by Cathars, particularly in Northern Italy, but he's seeing them everywhere. But the other thing he's obsessed by, particular threat of heresy in the Languedoc, in the south of France. And perhaps we should take a break at this point. And when we come back, we can explore why innocent the third thinks that that that region but before we do that i'm just going to come out and say it i know everybody thinks

that i'm going to be thinking it i am thinking it there are so many resonances aren't there between all this and uh speaking as a speaking as a chief gammon you know well yeah and the culture wars of the present moment i can i mean when you were talking i was just thinking oh my god it's the national trust well so so perhaps we could at the end of this this series we could we could look at that those resonances brilliant but for the time being we will we'll stay in the long dock don't worry uh we were back in the long dock amid the castles and all that stuff after the break. access to live tickets head to the rest is entertainment.com that's the rest is entertainment.com welcome back to the rest is history with a renowned historian uh tom holland and top albino monk me dominic zambra if you haven't listened to our previous podcast in the da vinci code that

will just be meaningless babble but let's hope that you have. Tom, so that I thought that was absolutely fascinating. And it was a complete revelation to me, actually, all that stuff about the sort of papal revolution and the creation of the idea of heretics and indeed Cathars. But why the southwest of France in particular? I mean, by the standards of early 13th century Europe, that there is, and by the standards of the Catholic Church, the Roman Church, there is a lot of heresy in the region. And the reason for that is the fact that we mentioned in the first episode, namely that this area is kind of quite remote from the centres of power, and it's quite rugged. And so you think of all those Cathar castles, they're kind built on you know outcrops of rock and so on and the fields are kind of gathered around them and they're very heavily worked so this is quite a long way you know it's it's the backwards it's it's the kind of areas well even now voted brexit or for trump or whatever i mean

that's yeah i guess vote for the National Front now, do they? I don't know. I don't know if they vote for the National Front now, but what I will say is you go to the Long Dot now, and some of those villages are very poor, are very, you know, they fill an awful long way from any metropolitan centres. So you can completely see how going back to the 12th century or whenever, 13th century, they would be places that the papal

revolution, the legalistic university-driven revolution, has not yet reached. Exactly. So the great university in France is obviously in Paris, and Paris is a very, very long way. So all those scholars, all those university-educated people who are then going on to, you know, staff the Curia, the papal court, and to provide the vast bureaucracy of the Catholic Church with its, you know, its lawyers, its bureaucrats, its teachers, and so on. They take for granted that they embody the universal truths of the church, even though they are actually the revolutionaries. So they forget the fact that, you know, they're the ones who were doing the innovations.

Right. We're not the cultural warriors. You're the cultural warriors. It's exactly that. It's exactly that. It's exactly that. So, yeah, kind of wonderfully, yes. And so it's the regions that are kind of beyond the remit of the church authorities, beyond the remit of bishops and universities and teachers and bureaucrats and so on, who are seen as, you know, why are they holding on to these ludicrous beliefs? Exactly. There are people who are saying, but I just think what everybody thought yesterday. No, no, no, no, no. So this is now a kind of heresy. And so it's this region between, I guess, the Rhône and the Dordogne in southern France comes to be seen as heaving full of kind of backwards people who don't use pronouns and have very unsound views of trans rights and all

that. They're the equivalent of that. They love flags and statues. Exactly. Flag shaggers. So the Third Lateran Council, where you had this thing about Patrines and Cathars, it actually specifies that the lands around Albi and Toulouse. So Toulouse is the great city of the region. Albi, we mentioned it in the previous episode, is the, it's the southernmost bishopric of the southernmost archbishopric in France. As,

as being a particularly kind of noxious breeding ground for heretics. And you get abbots and papal legates kind of visiting the region and they're appalled by it so it's kind of like you know people come to chipping norton or deeds well actually maybe it's made by people go to it's actually what it is it's when the guardian sends people out to hull to find out what people are thinking yes listen to gammon's gammon's in pubs in the aftermath of brexit they will send people to the north of england and come back absolutely appalled by what they... Yeah. And what they find there is that the people in this region dislike the kind of, you know, the representatives of this papal revolution as outsiders.

They kind of dismiss the whole idea of reformatio, of reformation, of, you know this idea that christendom can should be purified and reformed and and and all that they dispute the claim to authority of of the pope's kind of into you know international apparatus of of uh of control its demands that that everybody you know all christians should should do what the papacy says, the deference that they demand, the tithes that they're obliged to pay, the services that they're meant to go to, all this kind of stuff. And also they dispute the idea that there is some kind of fundamental division between priests and the laity. So that was kind of what the Patrines were targeting, because they felt that because the Bishop of Milan and his clergy had concubines, therefore, they were not pure.

They were not separate. You know, like they weren't Cathars. They hadn't separated themselves from the mass of the laity. But this in around Toulouse, around Albi, this is seen as something that's absolutely fine, because it had always been fine. You know, that had always been the way it had been. So the priests and the people are very, they're not distinguishable in a way in that area. And so the heretics in this region, you know, they're not called Cathars. They're called Boni homines in Latin, which can mean both good men and good women.

And you have this idea that holiness is not only to be found in priests that actually you know members of the laity can be at least if not more holy than priests yeah and so you have men are holy if they display courtesy because this is a very very intense competitive world um where people are scratching a living from very poor soil often. And they're kind of living cheek by jowl. And so structures of courtesy have evolved that enable order to be kept. And this is the world of the troubadours. You know, they celebrate people who are models of good manners yeah who behave well and these models

of courtesy of good behavior are seen by people in the region as being overtly christian models that they are that they enable you to be holy so you know a man who is who is a kind of you know a model of courtesy a model of self-restraint he's a good man by virtue of that right and likewise women also can win this status but very particular types of so so prepubescent girls and women who have been married and have gone through the menopause so they can so they can be good women so it's basically chastity to some degree is it yes essentially yeah but it's people who who who cannot yeah yeah i mean basically it's basically chastity to some degree is it yes essentially yeah but it's people who who who cannot yeah yeah i mean basically it's people who are outside the cycles of of sex and marriage and childbirth yeah and the very holiest are believed you know that you can attain um you

can approach the perfection of christ this is a kind of great dream identification with with with the figure of christ and that therefore the divine is manifest in the everyday so that is a bit like the the stereotypical view of the cathars the sort of slightly conspiracy theory view that they have a horror of sex or whatever and the horror of the material world they don't have a horror of it they don't have a horror of it they don't have a horror of it but i think the the the idea that these good men who basically, you know, they hold views on church doctrine that are kind of both distinctively their own. So in some ways they are heretical. They seem to have downplayed the significance of the Old Testament, for instance, to have only valued certain books of the bible and these kind of heresies when they're debated you know so you get uh scholars and monks going in there and debating with the good men and they're often kind of appalled by what seems to them overtly heretical statements but at the same time the good men are capable of giving perfectly orthodox summations of christian doctrine so it's

it's it's not kind of radically radically unorthodox it's a question of what they're emphasizing rather question what they're emphasizing and there are you know there are lots of people so a lot of say the lords the ladies in the region you know they're aware of what's going on in the broader world they are orthodox catholics but they don't feel obliged to go after the good men and the people who regard them as holy because the divisions between them aren't that great. You know, it's just kind of shades of difference. They're not that great. But what starts to kind of entrench the divisions, it's not just that the people from outside, the papal legates and so on, the monks who are coming in

are appalled and start seeing heresy. It's also the fact that the good men, as they feel themselves being the objects of the contempt of the outsiders, start to see the outsiders as the heretics. And so, for instance, you have a bishop who overtly denounces them as heretics. And the reply of the good men is that it's not they who are heretical, but the bishop who pronounced judgment upon them. And they describe him as a ravening wolf, a hypocrite, and a foe of God. And his judgment is dishonest. So now the culture war is raging in earnest. So it is a culture. You could describe it as a culture war.

The polarization is starting to happen, as always happens when each side starts to kind of impose stereotypes on the other. But that's not all that's happening. That's not the only reason. Because there's a lot of high politics in this. There is also a lot of high politics going on as well. So this region is not integrated into one of the kind of unitary kingdoms that are starting to emerge in this period. So nominally, you know, you have the kings of France, the kings of England, both kind of claim an overlordship over it. And the king of England is Henry II in the mid 12th century.

He marries Eleanor of Aquitaine. And he says that Eleanor of Aquitaine has brought with her as part of her dowry these lands and that therefore they should be subject to him right and so in 1159 Henry launches an attempt to conquer Toulouse that is a disaster and Henry is furious about this and basically he launches a kind of vendetta against everybody in the region and the counts of Toulouse in particular, all of whom are called Remor. And so, More makes the point that one consequence of his vendetta is that almost everything we read of the development of heresy in the region of Toulouse over the next 20 years comes from English sources. Because accusing your enemies of heresy is an absolutely, you know, it's an absolute, by this point, it's becoming a default way to target your opponents.

And so, it's Henry II, he plays a big part in establishing the the image of this region is kind of riddled with heretics does he absolutely and in 1163 there's a council at tor with the pope the pope is there yeah and henry ii is there and all these kind of promulgations are made and and the canons gets heresy it's it's kind of clearly been sharpened by Henry II that they're being targeted at the Count of Toulouse. Right. So in other words, he's basically saying it's a region of deplorables left behind. So you haven't signed up to your revolution. And you know what? You should give me sanction to go in, clean this up. I'll sort it out. Yeah, pretty much. I mean, yes, the modern analogy might be people saying that, you know, your enemies are communists or fascists or far left or far right or whatever. Yeah.

You just tar them with the extremists. I mean, it's what people do on social media all the time, isn't it? Yes, exactly. You don't slightly disagree with me. You're a bigot. Exactly. Yes, exactly so. But adding to the complication is that the Count of Toulouse, who I said is always called Raymond, he is in a constant state

of rivalry with the Viscount of Béziers and Carcassonne, who are two kind of large towns, large cities in the south of France. And they're a family called the Troncheval. And they also are endlessly kind of chucking accusations of heresy at each other. Yeah. So you put in your notes, they're always accusing each other of being fascists or racists or something.'s that kind of thing yeah yeah um and in 1165 raymond counter to lose summons all all the magnets all the bishops all the kind of big wigs to a big summit which is specifically designed to identify heresy in the region and basically kind of dump it all over all over the vicomte of bezier and carcassonne and both kind of dump it all over the Viscont of Béziers and Carcassonne.

And both sides are doing it, but it's an incredibly dangerous game because, of course, in the broader world, you're getting, you know, in Rome and in the universities, this increasing paranoia about heresy. And so when you have Innocent III coming to the papal throne, you know, this is a disaster waiting to happen and so he is looking at this region and he's getting you know he's getting messages left right and center telling him that this is absolutely pestilential that there are it's complete breeding ground for heresy and something should be done and so innocent he turns to the king of france philippe augustus philip ii yeah you know the great french French king who kind of moulds and shapes France as the greatest monarchy in Christendom.

No friend of Richard the Lionheart. Or indeed John. And he says, look, go down there and sort it out. But Philip doesn't want to do that because he's got bigger fish to fry. He's trying to, you know, he's trying to see off John. He's got Otto IV. He says, you know, I'm menaced by two lions in the form of the king of england and and the emperor and basically i need to see them off right paris is the center of you know northern france is the center of his interests he doesn't

want to get diverted by getting sucked into the kind of the bog of the south so he refuses so innocent keeps saying go on go and have a crack at the heretics in the south of France. And Philippe keeps saying, no, I'm not going to do it. At the same time, Innocent is trying to get Raymond, I think he's the sixth of the Count of Toulouse, basically to kind of get him to heal. And so he's threatening with excommunication and telling him that he will be excommunicated unless he expels all the heretics. And Raymond, who's been busy accusing all his enemies of heresy actually he doesn't want to do it because he doesn't you know he's kind of basically made it up i mean not completely but he doesn't you know he so innocent is saying you know he's he says wounds that do not respond to the treatment of a poultice should be cut away with a knife

but this is the kind of language that raymond very, very opposed to. He doesn't want to start cutting out people, you know, who may be his servants, his friends, his liege men. Well, not least because they're not. So to be absolutely clear, they're not doing secret rituals. They're not believing in anything wacky. They're actually just believing what everybody believed a few decades by and large by and large by and large i mean they do have their own kind of heretical takes on things but everyone does yes because there's never been uniform because there's never been a uniform a kind of institutional right and ideological uniformity imposed before that is what is going on yeah and and so of course

but but but raymond is very very you know he doesn't want to i mean it would create havoc it would be terrible. It would devastate his land. So he refuses. But he feels the breath of the Pope down his neck. And so in 1205, he says, yes, okay, I will expel all the heretics from his land. And he says this, and then he does absolutely nothing. And so two years later, he is visited by two papal emissaries.

And one of them is a man called Peter de Castelnau, who is the Pope's official envoy to the region. And another is a guy called Arnold Amelric, who is the abbot of the Cistercian Abbey of Citeaux. And the Cistercians have been very, very prominent in visiting the region and arguing with the good men and reporting back in alarm terms to the Pope about the prevalence of heresy in the region and arguing with the good men and reporting back in alarm terms to the Pope about the prevalence of heresy in the region. And they basically lay it on the line. And they tell Raymond that he has to join an armed league, his own liegemen, his own vassals, that he has to expel Jewish officials, again, on whom he's very dependent that basically he has to cut away everything that has sustained

his own administration you know and this is a kind of terrible thing raymond can't really do that because it would destroy his his ability to to rule as count and so he refuses and he's excommunicated and you know this is this is very very alarming for him because he's now very nervous that the king phil, will come for him. Actually, Philip doesn't, but Raymond doesn't know this. And so early in 1208, he writes to Peter de Castelnau and he says, look, I'm ready to surrender. I'll do what you say, because he's so nervous about what's going to happen otherwise. So early January 1208, Raymond and Peter de Castelnau meet at a place called Saint-Gilles-du-Gas, which is right on, almost on the coast, south of France.

Gilles was a hermit, has a kind of famous church, famous pilgrimage center. And Raymond tries to arrive at some kind of compromise. De Castelnau is absolutely obdurate, refuses to. The meeting breaks up. No consensus has been arrived at. The next morning, de Castelnau is crossing the river Rhone when he is ambushed by a knight who is never identified. Oh my word.

And gets run through, you know, gets stabbed in the back. And de Castelnau dies. And it's clear that it wasn't Raymond who commissioned it because he had everything to lose from it. But when the news is brought to the Pope, a poet in due course will write the immortal line,

when the Pope heard of his legate's death, you can be sure he was not pleased. And this poet was, he's a man who's writing in Occitan. So the language, the longer doc, the language of the region. A man called William of Tudela william of tudela and this poem in occitan is called the caso de la cruzada song of the crusade and it's the first use of that word crusade so this idea that the holy wars can be fought against enemies of god that reach all the way back to 1095 when the Pope Urban II had summoned warriors to go and relieve Jerusalem from the Saracens.

Various holy wars since then had been launched, but never before had the word crusade been used or a variant on crusade to describe this war. And it demonstrates the full horror of what is about to be visited on the region ruled by Raymond. A crusade against a region where the enemies that they're looking for don't even exist effectively.

Where the secret shadowy church, you know, I read a book when I was a teenager in which people always dressing up in white robes and purifying themselves and, you know, behaving in that sort of stereotypical conspiracy theory way with occult symbols and stuff. And absolutely, you know, that was just, that was not happening. Well, I mean, to reiterate, there are, by the standards of the Roman church, there are heretics there. I mean, they clearly hold people there are people who hold heretical beliefs but it's not the kind of black and white the manichean vision yes that the pope has and this is another of the paradoxes that i said that in some ways

it's the roman church that because it wants to purify everything you know that that that it's it's it's the servants of the roman church who are the Catharoi, the Puritans, the Cathars. They're the ones whose mission it is to cleanse the world. And in the same way, this idea that there is a dualist church, a church that sees the world as divided into rival powers of good and evil. Actually, this isn't believed by the heretics, but it's kind of believed by Innocent III. He believes that believed by innocent the third right you know he believes that the power of the devil is manifest and that it is threatening with christendom with ruin and the results are well i mean apocalyptic perhaps is the right word to use so if you've

been there tom you just said you want to see a cathar mate look in the mirror i would you want to see a manichean look in the mirror and the m. You want to see a Manichean? Look in the mirror. And the Merovingian bloodline? Not there. Not there. Oh, how disappointing. So we will return on Thursday with the heart-stopping climax of this story. Or, of course, if you just can't wait to hear about the Albigensian Crusade, Europe's first genocide. And I hear people saying that to me all the time, that they're looking forward to hearing about this. Tom, what they have to do, they go to www.restishistorypod.com. If you're a regular listener, you will know that off by heart, of course. And you can sign up to our members club and you can get early access to this truly gory and blood-soaked tale. It's a horrible, horrible story.

Yeah. Brace yourself for some horror. But I think the listeners actually quite like horrible stories. Well, we'll find out when we check the listening figures. All right. We will see you next time for a horrible story. Goodbye. Okay. Bye-bye. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com.

That's restishistorypod.com. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com.