The Cathars: The Most Successful Heresy of the Middle Ages

With the renewed vigour inspired by Geoffrey d’Ablis and Bernard Gui, the Inquisition eventually caught up with nearly all of the Autier Perfect. They were arrested, interrogated and burnt during 1309–10.

If their virtue set them apart, then the Cathars’ beliefs further removed them from the mainstream of Christian life. They inherited much from the Bogomils. Like them, the Cathar faith was dualist, holding that the material world is evil, the creation of the devil himself. The true god existed in a world of eternal light beyond the dark abyss of hu

The Languedoc in the year 1200 was a society in remarkable flower. It was one of the most cosmopolitan and sophisticated areas of Europe: trade flourished in the great towns of Toulouse and Carcasonne, with Toulouse itself being only outclassed by Rome and Venice in terms of size and cultural life. The arts were enjoying a renascence, with the idea

A much greater challenge was to come from the Inquisition. Either side of the arrests, two men were appointed to run the Inquisition in the Languedoc who would go down in history as two of the most able churchmen ever to hold down the job: Geoffrey d’Ablis and Bernard Gui, presiding over Carcasonne and Toulouse respectively. The confessions they ex

One hypothesis holds that the Cathar treasure, which was smuggled out of Montségur shortly before the surrender, was in fact the Grail, which was then either hidden in a nearby cave, or entrusted to the Knights Templar.

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.

As the long night of the Dark Ages descended over Europe, the Church faced threats from two different sources: the rise of the new religion of Islam, which began to make rapid inroads into Christian kingdoms from the early eighth century, and the waves of nomadic invasions that began with the Huns in the fourth century. The Church’s position was fu

if you were a woman in the Languedoc of 1200, it made more sense to be a Cathar than a Catholic.

At the turn of the first millennium, a peasant called Leutard in the village of Vertus, near Châlons-sur-Marne in the north-east of France, had a dream. In it, a swarm of bees attacked his private parts, and then entered his body – presumably through his urethra. The dream, rather than making Leutard wake up half the village with his screaming, ins