The Cathars: The Most Successful Heresy of the Middle Ages

The Bogomil church was divided into two main classes, the Perfect and the Believers, similar to the Manichaean Elect and Listeners, although the Bogomils apparently did have a Listener class as well, who were below the Believers.

After a month of dealing with other issues – the preparations for the Fifth Crusade, the forcing of all Jews and Muslims to wear a yellow mark on their clothes to distinguish them from Christians – Innocent finally had time to address the situation in the Languedoc, which was, as ever, grave.

Once the Inquisition had names, it was merciless in its pursuit of suspected heretics. The Inquisitors had the power to search a house, and burn down any building where heretics were known to have hidden.

Bosnia had always had a reputation for heresy. As early as 1203, Innocent III had urged the king of Hungary – the Church’s only real ally in eastern Europe and the Balkans – to mount a campaign against the heretics there. The Ban – or ruler – of Bosnia, Kulin, was thought to be a heretic, as were 10,000 of his subjects.

The decisive development that paved the way for the Cathars’ great predecessors, the Bogomils, was the establishment of the first Bulgarian empire (681–1118).

Peter Autier spent eight months in prison before being burnt on 9 April 1310 in Toulouse.

Peter and William received the consolamentum from an Italian Perfect in Cuneo, a town in south-west Piedmont, which had been a centre for exiled Languedocian Cathars since the middle of the century. Then, around St Martin’s Day (11 November) 1297, Bon Guilhem reappeared in Ax. He informed the Autiers’ extensive network of family and supporters that

More recently, it has been the subject of Dan Brown’s global bestseller The Da Vinci Code. However, the idea that Jesus married Mary Magdalene does not originate with Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln: one of the Cathars’ inner teachings, which was only passed on to the Perfect, was that the Magdalene was Jesus’s wife.112 This is puzzling, to say the leas

It was Amaury de Montfort who inadvertently brought more grief on the Good Christians. After several years of losing ground to both Raymond VII and Roger Bernard of Foix, Amaury and Raymond agreed a truce in the summer of 1223. In January 1224, Raymond took control of Toulouse, and the following month Amaury admitted that he was beaten. He ceded al