The Cathars: The Most Successful Heresy of the Middle Ages

So it was not just a case of simple ingratitude when Brutus and the others turned on the man who had given them a second chance. It was partly that. It was partly motivated by self-interest and disgruntlement, driven by the assassins’ sense of dignitas. But they were also defending one view of liberty and one view of the importance of Republican tr

For Carthage fell because she was faithful to her own philosophy and had followed out to its logical conclusion her own vision of the universe. Moloch had eaten his children.

When at last the walls were breached, the Norman commander Tancred of Hauteville (d.1112) promised protection for the city’s inhabitants; but the crusader army disregarded his orders and – on entering the city – indiscriminately massacred Muslims, Jews and Arab Christians, not sparing women and children. The scale of the atrocity can scarcely be ex

Speaking broadly, Saint Ambrose determined the ecclesiastical conception of the relation of Church and State; Saint Jerome gave the Western Church its Latin Bible and a great part of the impetus to monasticism; while Saint Augustine fixed the theology of the Church until the Reformation, and, later, a great part of the doctrines of Luther and Calvi