The Rest Is History - 303: The Bloodiest Crusade

Episode Date: February 9, 2023

Thought by some as the first genocide in Europe, the Albigensian Crusade was the bloodiest crusade in history. Following the Mystery of the Cathars and the Real Da Vinci Code, Tom and Dominic come to the conclusion of their series on the Cathars with an extraordinary and bloody tale of ideological tyranny. *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 join the club. That is therestishistory.com. In the field of the Monulia was planted a garden, which burst forth and blossomed every day. It was sown with lilies. By the white and the red which budded and flowered were flesh and blood and weapons and the slosh of splattered brains. Spirits and souls, sinners and saved, the freshly killed replenished hell and paradise. We are joined by renowned historian Tom Holland, as always this week, talking about the Cathars. And Tom, that was from an anonymous troubadour, I think, talking about the Albigensian Crusade. by mark gregory peck in his book a most holy war

which is um a brilliant account of the subject of today's episode dominic yes albigensian crusade and its aftermath so to recap for those people who are coming to us fresh this is the third of um a mighty trilogy the first episode was about albino monks was about yes a man from doctor who um the creation of the da Vinci code conspiracy theory the idea of the cathars as the secret society part of this world including the templars and the priory of scion that protected the merovingian bloodline of jesus and mary magdalene in the second episode tom you talked us through the reality the historical reality what historians now think about the Cathars. Most. Not all, I think, but most.

And their role as a sort of resistance was a holdout against the great revolution of the papacy within Christendom in what the 11th, 12th centuries, I suppose. And now we're into the action. We are. Because now there's going to be an awful lot of spattered brains in this story. And it's our first crusade on the show. So the crusades is a kind of obvious topic, isn't it? That we haven't actually touched till now. So we're plunging in with, you know, in many ways, the darkest, I think.

Right. Because the most one-sided, I suppose, of the crusades. Do you think? I think because it looks forward to some of the darkest episodes in modern history okay um and perhaps talk about that at the end the way in which you know it's a very modern war right yeah but we maybe talk about that towards the end of the show so we ended the last episode and a real cliffhanger so that was the beginning of 1208 raymond of toulouse who's been going back and forth. He's accusing people

of being heretics, but he's also been trying to resist attempts to cleanse his territory of heresy. He's had this unsuccessful meeting with the papal emissary, who then unfortunately has been murdered by a knight the very next day. And so, Tom, what happens next? So Innocent III, the the great pope perhaps the most powerful pope who who has ever ruled he's furious and he blames raymond and sees that raymond the country blues is in associate you know he's he's in the clutches of of all these heretics that he thinks are teeming everywhere in the region so he he wants the heresy cleaned up and so he he does what he's been doing for several years and he turns to to the king of France, Philip Augustus II, who is distracted.

He's facing invasion by John, the king of England. He's got the Holy Roman Emperor as well, and he can't be bothered. He doesn't want to get distracted with all this nonsense down in the south. And so he refuses. And Innocent, he's had enough. If the king won't go, then Innocent is going to conjure up his own army. And he does it in the way that popes have been conjuring up armies to fight against the enemies of Christ since the end of the 11th century, which is to summon them to an armed pilgrimage. Now, we know these armed pilgrimages

as crusades, but this is a word that doesn't start to be used until this period. And it derives from the idea that you sign yourself with the cross. So cruci signati. And preachers go out throughout the winter of 1208 and 1209, summoning men from across not just France, but the whole of Christendom, to take up the cross. So a preacher says, the cross that is fixed to your coats with a soft thread was fixed to Christ's flesh with iron nails. In other words, that by putting on the cross, in some way they are imitating Christ, and that this armed pilgrimage offers warriors the chance to live as Christ lived, so that the warfare, the slaughter that they will bring is sanctified. It's holy. It's doing God's purpose, and it's emulating Christ. And Pegg,

in his book, describes this as an absolutely fateful moment, that it's the merging, he says, of a century or more of Latin Christian thought on heresy and holy war. So, you know, these are traditions traditions the idea of holy war the idea that there are there are heretics everywhere these are traditions that that have kind of been emerged from the great papal revolution of the 11th century and they've been moving in parallel throughout the 12th century yeah and now under innocent the third they're being joined and you know this is an incredibly fateful moment. And Innocent sees it as potentially apocalyptic, that if heresy is not destroyed, then it is more dangerous than, say, the Saracens,

because it's a sickness within the body of Christendom itself. And is this, Tom, the first great example of this idea of fighting a holy war against the enemy within? I mean, that's something we're so familiar with now. You know, the real enemies are within your house. You know, they're not the Muslims or whoever it might be. They are other Christians. Exactly. And so that is why the heretics are so dangerous is that, you know, if you allow them to live, then you might become a heretic. It's kind of like a zombie plague. You know, if you allow the zombies to spread, then you yourself will become a zombie. The real enemies are not the capitalists, they're the Trotskyites or whatever. That's what it foreshadows, isn't it? Yeah, I suppose. And in the episode we did

on the Nazis, we were talking about how anti-Semites see the Jews as a kind of disease. And that's pretty much what Innocent III is seeing heretics as. And he feels that unless the heretics are destroyed, then their infection will spread and corrupt the entire body of Christendom. And everything that the church exists to do to bring the Christian people to God is in the balance. So in that sense, the stakes couldn't be higher. It is a war with cosmic resonance. So this is the language that is being used. This is the background to this kind of drumbeat of warriors from across Europe, starting to mass and head down in the early months of 1209 towards the south of France. Meanwhile, you can imagine that

Raymond VI, the Count of Toulouse, who's kind of in the eye of the storm he spends all this period absolutely crapping himself a technical term tom yeah but accurate and so he is sending endless kind of messages to rome kind of saying it's fine you know i'll do whatever you want please stop it um and um as the uh as the army start to kind of mass in uh in 1209 basically he he completely surrenders and it's all very game of thrones because he he's an excommunicate and so to be welcomed back into the fold of the church he's made to walk naked all right through the streets of st gilles where he'd be negotiating with the the papal emissary who then gets killed so in a way he's kind of accepting responsibility for the murder of that emissary even though almost almost certainly, you know, he had nothing to do with it.

And so he's led through the streets. He goes into the great church, the Shrine of Saint-Gilles. He swears repentance. He is flogged by the papal envoy. He's given a kind of coarse robe like Christ wore. So Christ was scourged, given a coarse robe. And then he is accepted back into the fold of the church and shortly afterwards in a brilliant move um raymond announces that he is joining the crusade

yeah you know if you can't beat them join them so raymond is the sort of poacher turned gamekeeper par excellence but he's turning on his own people there is he tom yeah but he's you know you got to do what you got to do um yeah i mean you know you've got to do what you've got to do. Yeah, I mean, you've got what is effectively the largest army that's ever been seen, you know, assembled in France on your doorstep. They're coming for you. I think it's understandable. It's not heroic, but it's understandable. And actually, even before Raymond does his, you know, walk of shame, the killing has actually already begun. So you have a band of crusaders who turn out of a place called Casanoi, which is kind of just south of the Dordogne.

So on the kind of the northern flank of this region. Yeah. And Casanoi gets captured by the crusaders and they round up people who they condemn as heretics and they burn them. And there's a poem written about this whole crusade and it has the lines, the many fair women thrown into the flames for they refused to recant however much they were begged to do so. And what would they be recanting though? So this is the thing is that as the crusaders come with their desire to target heretics, so the people who are being condemned of heresy come to see the crusaders come with their desire to target heretics, so the people who are being condemned of heresy come to see the crusaders as an enemy and therefore to hold on to their

own positions all the more dogmatically. And, you know, they are ready to die for it rather than to submit. But specifically what? In other words, there I am, I'm in Casanoi, I'm going to imagine myself a butcher and I'm being dragged, or I'm going to imagine myself a butcher, and I'm being dragged, or I'm going to imagine myself a fair maiden. I'm being dragged to the pyre. I'm sure listeners will enjoy this image. I'm being dragged to the pyre, there I am. And then people say, recant, or we will burn you, or whatever. What could I recant? What do I believe? So that is a really interesting question. I mean, we talked about aspects of it in the previous episode, this idea that the representatives of the kind of the papal establishment are outsiders, are aliens, are the heretics themselves, that the structures that govern the rhythms of Christian life in this region are seen by those who cleave to them as much holier, much more authentically Christian than that of the Crusaders. And I think there's indisputably over the course of this war, you know, as wars always do, it entrenches a sense of division. But you're right that the readiness of people in the region

to suffer martyrdom is really, really striking. And I think that perhaps we should look at that later on when we look at what happens when the war is over and the degree to which this heresy, if you want to call that uh survives and endures and transforms because one of the aspects of this that is horrifying and meant to be horrifying is that the burning of heretics is consciously offered up as a kind of holocaust um burnt offerings to the lord you know they are this is meant to be seen as something that is kind of simultaneously horrible and joyous and that i think is is what is so unsettling and shocking about the whole process and was clearly unsettling to contemporaries as well right and that that that

burning in um in casanoi is merely the precursor for the most famous and notorious Holocaust of the lot, which is the great town of Béziers, which is one of the two cities of Toulouse. And the vicomte of Béziers and Carcassonne in this period is a guy called Raymond Roger. And he is both the nephew and the rival of Raymond, the Count of Toulouse. So they kind of, you know, they're related, but they hate each other in the best traditions of medieval, medieval lords. And this is why Raymond VI, who has, you know, repented, recanted, been welcomed back into the church and become a crusader, when he approaches Arnold Amalrec, the abbot of Citeaux, who is serving as the papal representative with this huge army, he turns up and he says, I think you should go to Vizier. So, in other words, target the city of his greatest rival. Yes. And Raymond Roger, who's only 24 and hasn't really been keeping track of what's been going on, is suddenly informed that the greatest Christian army ever, as it's being described, is coming towards him. He summons all the people of Béziers to a meeting and he says, guys, you're on your own. And then he scrams and heads off and kind of hunkers down in Carcassonne.

And the people in Bézier think, oh, God. And the whole story is tragic and comic in equal measure because the crusading army camps down in front of the walls of Bézier. Bézier has very, very strong fortifications. The people in Bézier think they're absolutely fine. Nothing, you know, they're not going to be stormed. And kind of various lads, they go out onto the bridge and they start kind of jeering at the crusaders and saying you know you're never going to get us and kind of you know running out sneering at them and then

running back in and there's a whole gang of lads who are accompanying the crusaders so they are described as ribald boys but i suppose you, you know, if you're in Liverpool, you might call them scallies, I guess. It's that kind of thing. You know, they're kind of lads who are camp followers. But, you know, they've got a bit of... They fancy a fight. They fancy a fight.

And basically, they're not having this stuff, you know, all the lads in Bézier. So they follow it and they get into a punch-up and the punch-up then develops and they start piling in. And before they know it, they've captured Bé up and the punch up then develops and they part they start piling in and before they know it they've captured beziere and all the knights kind of look up and go oh and so they pile in and the slaughter proceeds so pegging in a most holy war has i mean the orb slowly darkened as rivulets of gore spilled down the streets and washed off the bridge sounds like one of my children's books tom yes absolutely and um inevitably the city is put to the torch because the idea of the holocaust is very important it has to be offered up as a burnt offering

and people in beziers have have um have gathered in the great church in beziers and we have a figure that 7 000 are incinerated there so there's um there's there's a book by uh a scholar called lawrence marvin which is very much focused not on the kind of the religious dimension of it but the military yeah he points out that um this figure couldn't possibly be true because as many observers including myself have concluded the church is simply not large enough to accommodate that many people oh so so that's a yeah you know that's that's an apt point he's a fun hating historian i think it's the but but but the point is that the incineration encourages these kind of stories because it's designed to be absolutely shocking you know this

is a burnt offering to the lord and the news of it reverberates across christendom it's an absolutely pointed display of divine vengeance that's that's what it's meant to be and um a decade after it perhaps the most famous saying that emerges from the albigensian crusade is attributed to arnold amalric who is the the papal envoy and this when the crusaders bursting into Béziers, and they can't distinguish between heretics and non-heretics, and one of them asks Amalric, well, you know, what do we do? How can we tell them apart? And the abbot replies, kill them, truly God will know his enemy. And whether he says that or not, it gets taken up and repeated because it articulates something very, very important, that the need to scour the region of heresy is more important than allowing the innocent to survive. So better ten innocent men are killed than one guilty man go free, basically.

And so Amalric writes to the Pope and he says that in Béziers, where thousands of people have been slaughtered or incinerated he says divine vengeance raged marvelously crikey that's um not quite turning the other cheek is it no but you know but but it is seen as the crusaders feel that they are imitating christ in doing this that this is what christ wants that this is what he would do so it's very it's kind of very sanguinary and weird and and terrifying and understandably everyone in carcassonne yeah you know i mean they're again to use the technical term crapping themselves um and the crusaders put carcassonne under siege for three weeks um after this period raymond roger decides i've had enough and he he opens negotiations inhabitants are allowed to leave wearing only

their shirts and so they do so all of them do they get to wear trousers nope just shirts apparently quite no trousers the people of this region are notorious for the uh the bright yellow tightness of their leggings so perhaps they're wearing those i don't know ungodly tom very ungodly but poor old raymond roger himself is taken captive despite the fact that he'd been given a promise of safe passage he's chained up and he dies three months later. So he is out of the way. And so the question now is who is going to become the new lord of Béziers and Carcassonne? And there are kind of various lords from the north of France who have turned up and they all think, actually, you know, this is a hiding for nothing.

Because the crusaders are, you know, their vow is to fight for 40 days and the 40 days are up. And so the likelihood is that large numbers are going to go away. So whoever is left in Béziers and Carcassonne is going to be surrounded by a very hostile population and not have many men. So they're all a bit nervous. So they say no. But then one of the northern lords says that he will do it. And he is a man in his mid 40s. He's from the vicinity of Paris.

He's also the Earl of Leicester. And he is a man called Simon de Montfort. To British listeners, Simon de Montfort, his son, you know, he's the guy who's associated with the founding of Parliament. The father of democracy. The father of democracy. democracy but simon de montfort his dad is a man who is very very devout possessed of a sense of his absolute holiness very very brilliant superb soldier and unbelievably brutal yeah and when the vast mass of the crusaders leave after the capture of carcassonne he's left with perhaps 100 knights few more i mean not you know very small number. And he's got

Carcassonne, which is a huge centre. He's got this kind of smouldering remains of Bézier. How's he going to hold it? And what he does is, year in, year out, crusaders will come and join him over the course of the summer. And then in the winter, they'll go. And the kind of ebb and flow of de Montfort's success and the ability of his opponents to recapture strongholds that he's captured just keeps on going on and so more and more of the region gets torched gets burnt fields get destroyed towns get demolished strongholds get toppled and it's absolutely hideous and it goes on year after year after year and so the cycle of war develops particular characteristics that make this crusade kind of notorious across christendom so the first

is the tradition of the holocaust continues so in 1209 the first fort that he captures a place called cast he makes a point of watching the first two people to be burnt right you know he's he's making a statement and then the following year in july 12 10 um simon and his men capture a place called minerve oh yeah i've been there yes it's a very very impregnable site it's kind of one of those craggy rocky places that tourists you know immediately kind of conjures up a sense of the savagery and the romance of the time. But I mean, there's very little romance actually about his story because it falls after six weeks. Arnold Amalric turns up just as the surrender is being negotiated. And because he's a man of God, he feels obliged to offer everybody inside the town a pardon.

And one of the crusaders says, well, what's this about? We want to burn them. And Amalric says, don't worry, I can guarantee you that it'll be fine because loads of them will not accept the pardon. And so 140 of the people of Minerva are burned. And it is reported that they were so hardened in their wickedness that they hurled themselves into the flames of their own accord. So again, this idea of the heretics willingly embracing the flame and you get a kind of detail that's almost kind of reminiscent of the episode that we did on the holocaust that afterwards the corpses have to be buried in mud because the stench of charred flesh is so revolting that crusaders who've just arrived just keep retching and vomiting 12 11 a place called lavar is captured

400 heretics are burned alive and again this is done with kind of a sense of joy. So it's coming genti gaudio, the phrase is the Latin phrase, with great joy. And at Lavar, the lady of the city who is not herself a heretic, but is accused of having been favorable to the heretics, she's thrown down a well and the crusaders hurls rocks onto her until she's crushed. You've used the word heretics a lot to describe the people who are being executed or the people who are being accused. And is it fair to say this is irrespective of their heretics is just the label that is being pinned on them because they are the local people of the who are on the wrong side? No, I think they are people who do hold opinions that would be defined.

I think so, yes. And we'll talk about exactly how these opinions may have evolved over the course of the crusade in the second half when we look at what happens in the aftermath of the war. But just to continue with the kind of the sense of the horrors of it, you have, as well as Holocaust, you have calculated atrocities. So, you know, garrisons will be captured. De Montfort will cut off, will will mutilate them cut off the noses you know gouge out the eyes and it's happening the other way around as well so if i don't know monks have been captured they'll be murdered uh de montfort's knights if they get captured there's a kind of a horrible story about them um you know they have their eyes gouged out and they're sent out into the winter to stumble their way back to carcassonne. And occasionally there are battles and campaigns in the open. And one of them is against the King of Aragon, who is coming to try and get rid of

Simon de Montfort and lay claim to this region himself. And he gets killed in a great battle at a place called Muret. So this sense of slaughter and horror is kind of escalating. But by and large, people across Christendom are seeing it as a kind of salutary demonstration of the power of christ so peg begins his his book a most holy war with this incredible description of one of the um the first ghosts to appear from purgatory it's a small boy who appears to a small girl um and he and he says he assures this girl that nothing has pleased god so much as the death and extermination of the aligensians. And the Albigensians is the word that's being used for the heretics of the region, the Albigois. And so it just goes on and on like this for kind of 20 years, endless slaughter, endless burning of fields, until finally, in 1218, you get this kind of deadlock between simon de montfort and raymond the sixth who is holed up in toulouse simon wants to capture toulouse and he feels this will end the war

and simon vows that he will capture toulouse within a week and the following day the ladies and and the small girls of toulouse are busy working a kind of siege engine you know because it's all hands to the deck they fire it and it crashes into uh simon's head and he drops dead oh that's a nice ending i'm glad that he's dead tom i didn't i didn't care for him i have to say he's a terrifying man and with him gone everything kind of falls to pieces because his son amory is who inherits that you know simon simon de montfort the younger simon inherits his olddom of Leicester, which is why he's able to be the founder of English democracy. But Amory turns out to be

absolutely useless, and he can't hold it together. And so the son of Philip II, the King of France, Louis, he is made of much sterner stuff. He much more of an enthusiast for for crusade than philip right and so in 1219 he does go down to this region and he conducts a siege of toulouse it's just about to fall then the 40 days are up and so louis feels that he's done his duty and so he goes back and so toulouse survives and raymond the sixth survives and raymond then dies in 1222, and his son, inevitably called Raymond, wants to bury him in a priory in Toulouse. But he can't because his dad is still excommunicated. And so the coffin with Raymond's body in it has to be left outside the priory church, where it is left for 200 years. 200 years 200 years yes and it it kind of you know it gets eaten you know the his

body gets eaten by rats the coffin rots away and it all just completely vanishes so it's i mean it's a kind of another dimension of the horrible yeah so many gothic details in this story yes so ray 7th succeeds him uh he's he's very kind of vigorous and able, but he knows really that he's up against it because by this point, Philip II's son Louis has become Louis VIII. And he really, really is determined to kind of annex the whole region and bring it under directly under French rule. So 1224, Louis VIII accepts the lands that Anne-Marie de Montfort had inherited from his father and he takes them over. So these are now kind of property of the French crown. And two years after that, in 1226, he takes the cross. He leads a crusade, the largest crusade since 1209,

and he invades the Languedoc. And again, it looks as though it's all up for Raymond. But Louis VIII falls ill, and he is taken back in a litter to Paris. And most people attribute it to dysentery. But there is one courtier thinks that it's because Louis VIII is very pious that he hasn't been having enough sex. And so he introduces a courtesan into the, you know, the tent where Louis is wasting away. And Louis is said to have covered his private parts and told the prostitute, Madam, it shall not be.

And he dies shortly afterwards. Which would be fair if he was wasting away. He's probably not in the mood. Quite, exactly. So 1228, Raymond VII finally kind of sues for peace. You know, he says, I give up. And 1229, peace treaty is signed in Paris. And this brings the war officially to an end.

And by its terms, Raymond remains the Count of Toulouse, but he loses a great eastern chunk of his territory, which goes to the French crown. The French crown has also grabbed Béziers Carcassonne. They keep that. Raymond's daughter, who's nine years old, a little girl called Joanne, is attributed to Louis' younger brother, a guy called Alphonse. And the stipulation is that their children will be the heirs of Raymond. So they will inherit

the lands of Toulouse. But the problem is that they don't have children. And so when Alphonse and Joanne both die in 1271, Toulouse as well passes to the French crown. And so it becomes part of the fabric of the kingdom of France. And the other term is that Raymond will continue to hunt out the heretics. And so even though the war has ended, the war against heresy hasn't. And I think that, you know, we should take a break. And definitely when we come back look at basically you know it's a question that you've been asking over again and i'm sure the listeners

have been pondering it as well is you know you know if there is no heresy or no major heresy why are they hurling themselves into the flames and perhaps talk about that okay i'm marina hyde and i'm richard osmond 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. with a sudden upwelling of reverence robert langdon fell to his knees for a moment he thought he heard tom holland's voice the wisdom of the ages whispering up from the chasms of the earth that's what it feels like for me tom listening to you talk about the cathars those are of course the final lines of the da vinci code one of the great texts of 2003 of the 21st century perhaps even of all time said nobody ever i'm sure didn't i'm sure dan brown must have said that i think i'm sure he's not an immodest man is he he might well say that other books angels and demons inferno are superior. As he's honed his craft.

So, Tom, we started with The Da Vinci Code. We've actually found our way into, I think, a much stranger and more interesting story. This is the story of the Albigensian Crusade. Completely agree. It is an extraordinary, fascinating story. So we ended with the end of the war. The counts of Toulouse have become belittled. I mean, they have less territory,

their French crown has got more territory. So you could look at this and say, well, this is just basically a land grab. But for the fact that you ended by saying that the Counts of Toulouse were told they had to continue fighting heresy and rooting out heresy, which suggests that it's not just a fig leaf, there's something very substantial going on there. And how is that war on heresy this was supposed to be all about? What's been going on with that? So, I mean, right the way through, I've been saying that by the lights of the Roman church, there are lots of people in this region who do count as heretics. And the particular focus is this notion that there are people called boni homines, the good men, the good women, who can attain a holiness that is equal to or greater than that of priests.

And this is absolute anathema to the Roman church. The division between laity and priests is fundamental to it, both because they have a very elevated sense of the role of the priesthood, but also because it's the priests and the clerics and the scholars who are responsible for instructing the vast mass of the Christian people in Christian doctrine. And so therefore, people who resist that are to be condemned. But for people in the Al-Bijwa, in this region that is being targeted by the crusade, do not see themselves as heretics. They see the invaders as heretics. And that's not just because they are defending beliefs that they

hold. It's also that those beliefs structure their entire way of life. So we were saying how you become a good man or a good woman because you practice courtesy. You display good manners. And this courtesy and this sense of good manners is important because life in this region is so tough. People are scrabbling over so much. And so if you tell people that, you know, good men or good women are heretics, then in a sense, you're knocking away the props that sustain not just people's relationship with God, which is obviously incredibly important to them, but also their ability to interact with their fellow human beings. And I think that

we talked about how the Cathars in the 21st century have a kind of very positive image that their new age, Kate Moss's book Labyrinth, cast them as feminists. This idea that there were female priests when the Catholic church obviously did not allow women and still doesn't allow women to become priests. And this idea that the Cathars had female priests derives from the notion that there were good women as well as good men. But I think that when you look more closely at who is allowed to become a good woman, you see the way in which the understanding of this institution, this idea that there are people who are of both sex who are capable of attaining a particular kind of closeness to God, closeness to Christ, the way that it actually has a kind of

social role. Because you can become a good woman if you're a girl before puberty. Yeah. And you can become a good woman again if you are a widow, you know, if you're a matron, if your childbearing years are over. But in between, you know, the moment you hit puberty as a girl, you're married off. And the reason for that is that this is a society in which virginity and female chastity, like everything else, fields, orchards, vineyards, or whatever, has to be tightly controlled because competition is so ferocious. So actually, it's the very opposite of a feminist paradise. And so there is an absolute chasm of incomprehension between the

Crusaders and the people who they are attacking. And I think that people are willing to die because they are standing up not only for their very, very devoutly held understanding of God and Christ and their faith, but also because that understanding of their faith is interwoven in their whole way of life. So R.A. Moore, the great historian of this Christian revolution, and specifically, you know, he wrote the War on heresy about this this whole process he makes a really intriguing parallel with the witchcraft panic in the 17th century yeah and so he writes the yawning chasm of mutual incomprehension between occitanians so the people of of the midi and outsiders makes nonsense of the natural questions of how many heretics there were and what proportion of the population supported them to ask these questions is rather like asking how many witches there were in europe on the eve of the great witch craze these are not labels where you can divide people into sheep and goats and say

here's the list of witches because it was so culturally conditioned and accusations are reflecting so many different factors absolutely but also what is happening and again this is where the parallel with the kind of the the sudden kind of upsurge of anxiety about witches is so interesting, that the backdrop to the Albigensian Crusade is a desire to define heresy much more tightly. So Innocent III, the great Pope who launched the Crusade in 1215, he holds another council at the Lateran, so the fourth Lateran council. And it's a confession of faith. It's about institutionalizing measures to improve the governance of the church, a better education of the clergy, better education of the laity. This is when the obligation is imposed on the laity to confess to a priest at least once every year.

So it's when the practice of confession is introduced it also starts to target not just heretics but also jews and muslims who if they're living in christian lands are obliged to wear separate clothing so that the divisions between christians heretics jews muslims are being made absolutely specific and moore says that um like all sweeping and visionary measures of administrative reform the implementation of the degrees would entail vastly increased responsibilities and opportunities for the administrators themselves. Later in the fourth was a charter for the clericalization of society so it's an expression of the fear that the educated, the scholarly, the clerical, the academic, you might say, have for the rustic

and the backward and the uneducated. Oh, my word, Tom, this is sort of, every institution needs to have its own sensitivity consultants. The idea that a revolution, an intellectual or cultural revolution needs administrators and bureaucrats, and that that opens up all sorts of opportunities. That'll be familiar to anybody who's read about stalinism or any great revolution and so then the question is well you know you were asking how how is it that this kind of polarized sense that the heretics themselves come to have that that persuades them to hurl themselves into the fire how does that kind of sharpen over the course of the war and its aftermath. And the Cistercians, so Amalric, who is the Cistercian abbot, the Cistercians are kind of intellectual shop troops for most of this period.

And they are constructing this ever kind of more totalizing sense of there being this heretic church full of the echoes of ancient heresies. And so this is really sharpening this idea that these heretics are part of a kind of ancient continuum. So this is when all the stuff about dualism starts to be written up. This hadn't been mentioned before the war. Oh, how fascinating. So the Manichaeanism. So the Manichaeanism is being written in. This is where you start to get the first mentions that they believe that Mary Magdalene was Christ's concubine. And they put that in presumably because it's so shocking.

But also because it's an ancient heresy. Right. So they're reading it up in their ancient accounts and putting it in. But before this point, people aren't talking about this being an issue. No. Fascinating. So this is something that the Cistercians are starting to construct. But also they're not just making it up because they're also speaking

to the heretics whom they're opposing and they report to the heretics that the heretics say that the roman church is a den of thieves and the harlot spoken of in the book of revelation and that has the kind of the ring of truth because the idea that the roman church is the whore of babylon is a standard trope for all kinds of heretics right the way into the Protestant Reformation. This is combined with the destruction, not just of the beliefs of the good men and the good women, but their whole way of life. Everything that has given structure and meaning to their life is being eradicated. And so by the end of the war, the few good men and good women who survive are, you know, they're refugees. They're hiding in woods, hiding in cellars,

looking for refuge wherever they can find it. And their attempt to kind of maintain the traditions and the rituals that had previously structured their life, it's kind of almost pathetic. You know, they're trying to keep alive something that is plainly destroyed it's kind of kind of tragic expression of nostalgia for a way of life that has entirely gone and they do you know they do find strongholds so monseguer which we've talked about throughout this series you know that's the last of the strongholds yeah famously yeah and they that you know great number get burnt it's the last great holocaust and i think that by that point what is interesting is that many of the heretics seem to have internalized the accusations leveled against them by the by their enemies and kind of

come to believe them oh that's interesting so in other words those accusations probably had a tiny tiny grain of i don't think they had any grain of truth i mean lots of them had no grain of truth at all you don't think they had any grain of truth but that people have started playing the part well so so there are some documents again and this is quite kind of Da Vinci Code and Holy Blood and Holy Grail. There are some documents that were found in the 17th century that claim to have been written by Cathars, heretics, whatever you want to call them, in the aftermath of the Crusade that do talk about dualism. And so there's much debate among historians about whether these are authentic or whether they are uh protestant fabrications but i think both moore and peg think that they are authentic and they both argue that these are expressions of the way in which you know the heretics have been so shattered so destroyed all the kind of underpinnings of everything that they

believed you know for generations have been destroyed that in a sense they're trying to hold on to a sense of their difference by by kind of basically you know they've got stockholm syndrome they're they're agreeing with what their accusers are saying and that takes us on to how you know it's not just a kind of military campaign that is being fought in the wake of the uh of the crusade to kind of snuff out the last outposts of this you also have the figures of inquisitors and it's not the inquisition right that's a 16th century phenomenon but it's it's inquisitors and these inquisitors are again absolutely an expression of this kind of intellectual revolution that is running concurrently with the broader institutional revolution in this period. Because what the inquisitors are doing is buying into the rediscovery of the text

of Aristotle, the great Greek philosopher, whose works had been found in Toledo when that was conquered from the Saracens in the 11th century and brought from Constantinople. And by 1200, all his works have been translated into Latin. And what Aristotle offers is an emphasis on reason. So that, in other words, the inquisitors, rather than relying on kind of ordeals, say the Monty Python stereotype that you kind of duck them or ordeals by combat or that kind of thing. They're saying, no, Aristotle shows us how we can use reason to penetrate to the nature of heresy, to examine it. And the obligation is enshrined both by the Fourth Lateran Council, but also by kind of various institutions that move into this region to try and crush the heresy, that the obligation is laid on to question and to interrogate and to

obtain evidence and to evaluate it and aristotle is the great model for this now dominic you'll be pleased to know that the guy who takes the lead in this yeah is a man who shares your name dominic good man uh dominic canis the hound of the lord dominic that's what people call me something they call me the hound of dacre well so so this uh this previous dominic uh he's a Spaniard, Dominic de Guthman. Yeah. He'd taken a big lead before the crusade in touring the region, combating heretics. He's still doing it throughout the crusade.

So there's this story reported by Peg that he goes to a town that's been sacked by the crusaders and there's a survivor there dominic is preaching trying to persuade the heretics to convert and one of the survivors suddenly gets attacked by a demonic cat that leaps up and hurls itself and kind of you know savages him um and this is taken as a sign that the man is a heretic and so he gets burned so this is the the world in which dominic is operating dominic is a flagellant is he tom i'm sorry to say he does yes so he he whips himself three times every night once for himself once for sinners and once for penitence in purgatory you know the key thing is that he is motivated by compassion for the heretics listeners may sound think this is this is insane to say this he's clearly a

psychopath i don't think he is so it was said of him that god had given him a special grace to weep for sinners for the wretched and the afflicted he is really really keen to redeem the heretics from satan to bring them to god as he sees it to bring them to christ and so he to do this he establishes um an order of, of fratres in Latin, which comes to be the order, first order of friars. Francis of Assisi has also established an order of friars at the same time. And the point of the friars for Dominic is that they can provide a kind, you know, they are rivals to the good men. So he knows that the heretics he wants to convert admire the good men as models of asceticism, of good behavior, people who are kind of not complicit in the institutional frameworks of the church. And so he establishes the friars as something that could perhaps kind of appeal to the heretics.

So they have no property. They live by begging. And they're not like monks because they're not retreating from the world. Right. to interrogate and educate and recover the heretics for the church. And this kind of dual approach throughout the 13th century into the 14th century of smoking out heretic strongholds and inquisitors kind of in a loving, God, you know, they see themselves as doing this for love. I will have you whipped and burned out of love yeah well i mean we're so kind of hostile to the whole idea of it but for inquisitors then they don't want to see heretics burnt if a heretic is burnt then it's failure it's like how i feel when i write a bad review. I don't enjoy doing it, but I'm doing it for the writer's own good.

And listeners may say, well, this is insane. But I suppose, again, to update it, maybe it's people who are trying to persuade people not to be racist. Going out there to persuade people not to be racist. And you feel compassion for racistsists you want to redeem them you want to i don't know how many people would be convinced by this analogy i think it's a very precise analogy and i think it's the best way to you know not just instinctively kind of despise the dominicans as bigots because i think it's much more complicated than that. But that whole thing that obviously, you know, I said for lots of people since the Middle Ages,

this is a terrible story. And, you know, it kind of highlights why I think the whole idea of the Cathars has been so popular, is that it kind of, you know, it reinforces the conceit of Catholics that the Catholic Church was in possession of the truth and that there were enemies of the Catholic Church. And to that extent, the crusade was justified. And likewise to Protestants or to Voltaire or, you know, right the way into the kind of the present age, new age people, whatever. It kind of demonstrates that religion is a terrible thing or whatever. I wanted to ask a quick question. How much does our romanticization of the Cathars,

our invention of the Cathars, if you like, the Cathars were, as it were, invented in the Middle Ages, but then our reinvention of them, how much does that owe to Protestantism? The Protestants wanted to see the Catholic Church as repressive and burning people. And they also wanted to believe that there had always been a resistance. Well, I think it's really telling that I mentioned Charles Schmitt, the French scholar who in the mid-19th century writes the book, which has identified these heretics as Cathars, from which the, you know, the sense of them as, inverted commas, Cathars derives. I think that's absolutely true. So there's a really, I mean, I think there's a really interesting parallel here with what happens in the wake of the French

Revolution. The French Revolution in so many ways is, although it's repudiating institutional Christianity and specifically the Catholic Church, it's so imbued with Christian assumptions. And exactly like the medieval church, the Roman church, it wants to wash the whole world clean of all kinds of sins and horrors and evils and it sees that those who are opposing them as being evil and the representative figures in the french revolutionary wars who embody this are the royalists of the vendee which is the region of france that is very very you know it's basically it's the same kind of region where the Great Crusade had been fought against heresy. Yeah, in the West Coast, Vendée. And in 1794, the leader of the revolutionary armies that are going to attack the counter-revolutionaries in the Vendée, you know, they're sweeping in.

And there's this problem about how do you identify revolutionaries and how do you identify counter revolutionaries? And the general says to his men, spare with your bayonets all the inhabitants you encounter along the way. I know there may be a few patriots in the reason. It matters not. We must sacrifice all. And that, of course, is very, very like. God will know his own. God will know his own.

Yeah. know his own god will know his own yeah i think it unsettles any idea we might have that the enlightenment or the revolution the french revolution is somehow less murderous less sanguinary less oppressive than the medieval church is that in the vonday you have no equivalent of the dominicans the dominicans are consciously trying to apply a scalpel. You know, they want to kill as few people as possible in the cause of healing this diseased flesh. Whereas the French revolutionaries have no time for that, because they feel that they're on the right side of history, and that those who are on the story of the albigensian crusade is unsettling because it's not just about how people in the middle ages were barbarous and savage and cruel it's about us as well yeah you know it's anachronistic to talk about progressives in the middle ages but if there were progressives in the medieval context it would be you know the roman church because they have a sense you know that it is their ambition to cleanse to purify to uplift to educate the vast

mass of the ignorant and bring them into the light and that essentially has always been you know that's the mission of the protestants it's the mission of the french revolutionaries it's the mission of progressives today so i think that that is why the story is so powerful and so unsettling, because it's not just about bloodlines of Christ, but it's also not about something that can be parked and sneered at as some example of medieval superstition and backwardness, because we are the heirs of those crusaders. We're not the heirs of the Cathars. Craigie, what a richly interesting and strange story, Tom. That was absolutely fascinating. Thank you for that. That was brilliant. I really enjoyed that. I knew nothing

about the Cathars really before we started. And I have to say I've learned an enormous amount. But what I'm going to do now is I'm going to return to my reading of Dan Brown's wonderful novel, The Da Vinci Code. Now, if you listened from the very beginning, from the first episode, you will know that we left it hanging with that moment when the curator, renowned curator, Jacques Saunier, was lying under a painting with an albino monk breathing down his neck. And, Tom, I know you know what happens next. I can't actually remember.

You said it was one of the great reading experiences of your life. That's what I remember you saying. I've moved on. I can't actually remember the plot. He gets kind of put in a pentangle or something, doesn't he? Yes. Like Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man. He's trapped in the grand gallery of the Louvre.

And all I will say is, wincing in pain, he summoned all of his faculties and strength. The desperate task before him he knew would require every remaining second of his life. That's how I feel about this podcast. Goodbye, everybody. It's goodbye for me, and it's goodbye from 48-year-old man, Dominic Sandbrook. Goodbye. Goodbye.com. That's restishistorypod.com. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment.

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