The Perfect Heresy Read Online Free

misunderstood by their opponents, fantastic slanders wereconcocted and repeated—in good faith—about their practices. Their name, once thought to mean “the pure,” is not their own invention;
Cathar
is now taken as a twelfth-century German play on words implying a cat worshiper. It was long bruited about that Cathars performed the so-called obscene kiss on the rear end of a cat. They were said to consume the ashes of dead babies and indulge in incestuous orgies. Also common was the epithet
bougre
, a corruption of
Bulgar
—a reference to a sister church of heretical dualists in eastern Europe.
Bougre
eventually gave English
bugger
, which is yet another proclivity once ascribed to Cathar enthusiasts. The term
Albigensian
, snubbed by modern historical convention for circumscribing the geographic reach of Catharism, was the invention of a companion of the crusade who related that the heretics believed that no one could sin from the waist down. We now know that the Cathars referred to themselves, rather soberly, as “good Christians.”
    Yet rumors about cat fondling and baby burning found listeners, as did more accurate accounts about the rise of an alternate Christian creed. The might of feudal Europe fell upon Languedoc in a righteous fury. In many ways, the hatred aroused by the heretics masked a deeper antipathy, one that pitted the twelfth century’s spiritual ebullience against the thirteenth century’s culture of lawmaking and codification. In its largest sense, then, the Cathar wars arose because Western civilization had reached a crossroads—historian R. I. Moore has provocatively seen the years around 1200 as a watershed that led to “the formation of a persecuting society.” Choices were made that would take centuries to undo. Less grandly, the fate of the Cathars can be viewed as the story of a dissidence unprepared for the vigor of its opponents. The Languedoc of the Cathars was too weakenedby tolerance to withstand the single-minded certainties of its neighbors.
    This telling of the Cathar drama, intended for nonspecialists, relies on the diligent research conducted by academic historians in the last half century. The principal primary sources behind the story will vary according to which act is unfolding. For the rise of the heretics from the 1150s on, the documentary record is spotty, and those documents that do exist—principally letters and the acts of Church councils—were penned by their enemies. If the Cathars had a written corpus at that time, it was destroyed by the Dominican inquisitors charged with extirpating the heresy 100 years later. Ironically, it took a twentieth-century Dominican friar, Antoine Dondaine, to dispel the fog of calumny and guesswork surrounding early Catharism by scouring archives to uncover heretical catechisms and treatises previously unknown to historians.
    As for the twilight years of the heresy, the Dominicans again played a role crucial to our understanding. However destructive they were of Catharism in general, the medieval friars proved splendid curators of its decline by taking down the proceedings of their investigations. The transcripts of Inquisition interrogations, the spoken words of long-vanished peasants and burghers, have been made widely available in recent years and form an inestimable boon to students of the period. One need only refer to
Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error
, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s classic work on one of the last redoubts of Catharism, to see the value of Inquisition registers in reconstructing the past.
    The heart of the story, however, takes place between the Cathars’ rise and fall, in the momentous time of open conflict that began with the sack of Béziers in 1209 and ended at the fallof Montségur in 1244. Fortunately, there were four contemporary chroniclers—only one of whom took the side of Languedoc—to witness and record the sudden triumphs and reversals of this eventful period, as well as several later