Cathars: Perfect Heresy, The
Stephen O’Shea
Number of quotes: 93
Book ID: 261 Page: 2
Section: 3A2A
That thirteenth-century crusade, directed not against Muslims in distant Palestine but against dissident Christians in the heart of Europe, was followed by the founding of the Inquisition, an implacable machine expressly created to destroy the Cathar survivors of the war.The Revolutionary Life and Death of the Medieval Cathars, The
Quote ID: 6532
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 4
Section: 3A1,4B
The church’s exterior was - and still is - a monument to power.
Quote ID: 6533
Time Periods: 4567
Book ID: 261 Page: 5/6
Section: 3A2A
“Kill them all, God will know his own.” The sole catchphrase of the Cathar conflict to be handed down to posterity is attributed to Arnold Amaury, the monk who led the Albigensian Crusade. A chronicler reported that Arnold voiced this command outside the Mediterranean trading town of Beziers on July 22, 1209, when his crusading warriors, on the verge of storming the city after having breached its defenses, had turned to him for advice on distinguishing Catholic believer from Cathar heretic. The monk’s simple instructions were followed and the entire population - 20,000 or so - indiscriminately murdered.
Quote ID: 6534
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 6
Section: 3H
...then play into the belief that the millennium lying between antiquity and Renaissance was an unrelieved nightmare.
Quote ID: 6535
Time Periods: 01234567
Book ID: 261 Page: 6
Section: 3H
In this sense, the story of the Cathars is surpassingly medieval. The Albigensian Crusade, which lasted from 1209 to 1229, was launched by the most powerful pope of the Middle Ages, Innocent III, and initially prosecuted by a gifted warrior, Simon de Montfort, under the approving eye of Arnold Amaury.
Quote ID: 6536
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 11
Section: 2C
Even a cursory description of the Cathar faith gives an idea of how seditious the heresy was. If its tenets were true, the sacraments of the Church necessarily became null and void, for the very good reason that the Church itself was a hoax.
Quote ID: 6537
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 12
Section: 3A2A,4B
To the Cathars, ecclesiastical trappings of wealth and worldly power served only to show that the Church belonged to the realm of matter. At best, the pope and his underlings were merely unenlightened; at worst, they were active agents of the evil creator.
Quote ID: 6538
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 12
Section: 4B
With startling ease, the Cathar preacher could portray medieval society as a fanciful and illegitimate house of cards.
Quote ID: 6539
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 12
Section: 3A2A
Rome could not allow itself to be publicly humiliated by the success of the Cathars.
Quote ID: 6540
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 20
Section: 3H
On the paths and rivers of the Languedoc of 1150, there were not only traders and troubadours but also pairs of itinerant holy men, recognizable by the thin leather thong tied around the waist of their black robes. They entered villages and towns, set up shop, often as weavers, and became known for their honest, hard work. When the time came, they would talk–first, in the moonlight beyond the walls, then out in the open, before the fireplaces of noble and burgher, in the houses of tradespeople, near the stalls of the marketplace. They asked for nothing, no alms, no obeisance; just a hearing. Within a generation, these Cathar missionaries had converted thousands. Languedoc had become host to what would be called the Great Heresy.Pastor John notes: John’s note: Cathars early
Quote ID: 6541
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 23
Section: 2D3B,3A2A
One of his predecessors, a certain Basil, had openly tried to convert the Byzantine emperor to the ways of dualism in the year 1100. The emperor was not amused, and Basil the Bogomil was burned for his temerity just outside the hippodrome of Constantinople.
Quote ID: 6542
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 24
Section: 3H
The Catholic precept of ex opere operato, non ex opere operantis (grace results from what is performed, not who performs it), through which a sacrament remains valid no matter how corrupt its celebrant, was rejected out of hand by the Cathars. The consolamentum had to be immaculate.
Quote ID: 6543
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 28
Section: 3H
Yet even these extreme instances of Church-baiting could be ascribed, charitably, to an excess of reformist zeal. Such was patently not the case with the Cathars. They stood aloof from orthodoxy, and, as soon became obvious, they did not stand alone.
Quote ID: 6544
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 30
Section: 3H
In Cologne, Germany, in both 1143 and 1163, fires were lit under the feet of dualist believers, and a German monk who witnessed their torment labeled the unfortunates Cathars.
Quote ID: 6545
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 32
Section: 3A1
For Lotario, there was little difference in the two positions - except that the supreme pontiff of Latin Christendom was by far the superior one. The pope was the sole earthly guardian of absolute, irrefragable truth. Disagreement with him was not dissent, it was treason.
Quote ID: 6546
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 33
Section: 3A1
....as Pope Gregory VII, had affirmed the pontiff’s superiority over all the crowned heads of Christendom.
Quote ID: 6547
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 38
Section: 2E1
Lotario had no doubt seen the Lateran’s collection: the heads of St. Peter and St. Paul; the Ark of the Covenant; the Tablets of Moses; the Rod of Aaron; an urn of manna; the Virgin’s tunic; five loaves and two fishes from the Feeding of the Five Thousand; and the dinner table from the Last Supper. The pope’s private chapel held the foreskin and umbilical cord of Jesus. Lotario’s beliefs, like those of the millions he now led, were rooted firmly in the material.
Quote ID: 6548
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 261 Page: 39
Section: 3A1,3A4
As Pope Innocent III, he had now been given, in his words, “not only the universal church but the whole world to govern.”
Quote ID: 6549
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 42
Section: 3H
...reproached a Catholic knight for failing to punish heretics, the man replied, “We cannot. We have been reared in their midst. We have relatives among them and we see them living lives of perfection.” It was asking too much of anyone to hunt down his mother.
Quote ID: 6550
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 51
Section: 2E1
Often the conflicts verged on the macabre. In 1197, the Trencavels contested the election of a new abbot in the highland monastery of Alet. Their emissary, Bertrand of Saissac, a nobleman with several Cathar Perfect in his family, came up with a novel solution to the dispute. He dug up the body of the former abbot, propped it upright in a chair, then called upon the horrified monks to listen carefully to the corpse’s wishes. Not surprisingly, given such ghoulish encouragement, a friend of the Trencavels easily carried a new election.
Quote ID: 6551
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 261 Page: 53
Section: 3H
An Easter tradition called “strike the Jew,” whereby members of the Toulouse Jewish community would be batted around a public square by Christians, was ended in the middle of the twelfth century, after hefty payments had been made to count and capitouls. The clergy protested but the ban held.
Quote ID: 6552
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 57
Section: 3H
In 1200, Innocent promulgated a decree that called for asset forfeiture, the medieval template of what modern justice does to drug smugglers. The property of heretics would be turned over to their persecutors, and blameless family members would be disinherited. Not only that, Innocent declared that the property of Catholics who refused to hunt heretics was also liable to seizure.
Quote ID: 6553
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 57
Section: 3H
Papal letters in 1204, 1205, and 1207 to King Philip Augustus of France promised the monarch all of Languedoc if he would raise an army and put the land to the sword.
Quote ID: 6554
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 60
Section: 3H
The Cathar story was about to take a final twist before the dogs of war were loosed.----
As Latin wordplay has it, they were the domini canes - the dogs of god.
Quote ID: 6555
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 60
Section: 3H
Saints and heretics have the same problem: Their stories have been so distorted by biased biographers that their lives are obscured by lies.
Quote ID: 6556
Time Periods: 247
Book ID: 261 Page: 60
Section: 3H
...diplomatic missions to Denmark before finally heading to Rome in the winter of 1205-6 to meet with the pope. Innocent, ten years Dominic’s senior, recognized spiritual power when he saw it. He denied the Spaniards’ request that they evangelize the Baltic countries and ordered them to Languedoc instead.
Quote ID: 6557
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 65
Section: 3H
It was Peter of Castelnau who brought these years of talking to a close, although not in the manner he intended.
Quote ID: 6558
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 65
Section: 3H
He did this in front of a large gathering, thundering out the final flourish of his anathema: “He who dispossesses you will be accounted virtuous, he who strikes you dead will earn a blessing.” It was, historical consensus holds, an extraordinarily provocative act by Peter, which signaled an impatience with the campaign of preaching and debating.
Quote ID: 6559
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 66
Section: 3H
A new excommunication ensued. All of Europe was invited to disregard him, to take whatever was his with the blessing of the pope.
Quote ID: 6560
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 66
Section: 3H
On January 13, 1208, the talks broke off amid much acrimony. Peter left St. Gilles with his retinue, bound for Rome. Early the next morning, opposite Arles, Peter and his escort rode out to the ferry crossing of the Rhone. As they waited by the riverside, the irreparable occurred. An unknown horseman bore down on them and drove home a sword through Peter’s back.The legate of Pope Innocent III lay dead on the ground. The conversation was over.
Quote ID: 6561
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 72
Section: 3H
Crusaders had been promised a full remission of their sins, a moratorium on their debts, and a transfer of Church funds into their pockets.
Quote ID: 6562
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 72
Section: 3H
For the French northerners, the proximity of Languedoc was ideal for doing one’s “quarantine” - the forty days of military service necessary to earn a crusader’s indulgence - then returning home in time for harvest and hunt, happy in the knowledge that heaven’s gate had swung open for one’s soul. The warriors did not consider the intended victims of their crusade to be fellow Christians. Heretics were not Christians; they were heretics.
Quote ID: 6563
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 72/73
Section: 3H
Third Crusade of Barbarossa and Richard Lionheart had failed. Instead, they ended up being mercenaries for the mariners of Venice, who had demanded such an extortionate fare for passage to Palestine that the knights could afford only to give payment in kind. This they did by spending the winter of 1202-3 besieging and sacking the Christian city of Zara, an Adriatic port that belonged to the Venetians’ commercial rival in the area. After Zara, the crusaders were taken by their shippers to Constantinople, which, by no coincidence, was Venice’s other principal maritime competitor. The crusaders saw a chance to salvage some respectability from their sorry meanderings by deposing the Greek Orthodox emperor and installing a Latin puppet in his place. First, however, they had to take the city, which they did in 1204 with vandalous panache, destroying more works of art and cultural treasures during their action than at any other time in the entire millennium of the Middle Ages. The orgy of rapine and robbery lasted three days and nights.
Quote ID: 6564
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 73
Section: 3H
Such bloody sideshows had come to characterize crusades. Whenever a mass of people intent on violence and assured of salvation got together, neutral bystanders knew to get out of the way.
Quote ID: 6565
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 73
Section: 3H
A feudal host was already sinister; one that had God on its side was downright diabolical. The crusade to Languedoc promised to be no different.
Quote ID: 6566
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 79
Section: 3A2A
The bishop of Beziers, who was part of the crusading force, arrived from Montpellier with a final offer. He had a list of 222 names - the Cathar Perfect of the town. He demanded that they be handed over for immediate punishment or else the crusaders would arrive the next day to lay siege to the city.
Quote ID: 6567
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 84
Section: 3A2A
“Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius” (Kill them all. God will know his own).
Quote ID: 6569
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 85
Section: 3A2A
At the cathedral in which the canons were holding a vigil for the Catholic faithful, the soldiery from the north charged the congregation, broad swords slashing and stabbing until no one within was left standing. The bishop’s auxiliaries were all slain. . . .The crusaders showed no mercy. . . .
....the church was full of terrified, weeping Catholics and Cathars when the crusaders broke down the doors and slaughtered everyone inside. A jumble of human bones, the victims of the massacre, was discovered under the floor of the church during renovations in 1840.
Quote ID: 6570
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 86
Section: 3A2A
As they watched, the city was consumed in flames, literally a funerary pyre for what scholarly consensus estimates at 15,000 - 20,000 victims.
Quote ID: 6573
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 86
Section: 3A2A
Everyone in the town, from graybeard Cathar Perfect to newborn Catholic baby, was put to death in the space of a morning. In the days before gunpowder, to kill that many people in so short a time required a savage single-mindedness that beggars the imagination.
Quote ID: 6574
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 87
Section: 3A2A
Personal salvation had been ensured by this stunning victory. In his letter to Innocent, Arnold marveled at their success. “Nearly twenty thousand of the citizens were put to the sword, regardless of age and sex,” he wrote. “The workings of divine vengeance have been wondrous.”
Quote ID: 6575
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 97
Section: 3A2A
As would become common in the Albigensian Crusade, monks and bishops sang hymns to remind the combatants of the supernatural purpose behind the fracas.
Quote ID: 6576
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 106
Section: 3A2A
In early April, a stumbling procession of about 100 men in single file arrived at the gates of Cabaret. They had walked across the inhospitable countryside from Bram, twenty-five miles away, a poorly fortified lowland town that had yielded to Simon de Montfort after only three days of siegework. The exhausted, whimpering men were Bram’s defeated defenders; each trudged through the dust of the courtyard with face downcast, an arm outstretched to touch the shoulder of the man ahead in line. The people of Cabaret soon saw the reason for their odd parade discipline. The men had been blinded, their eyes gouged out by the wrathful victors. So too had each man’s nose and upper lip been sliced off - they were walking skulls, their unnatural, immutable grins a hideous spectacle of mutilation. Their leader, who had been left with one eye so as to guide his companions from Bram to Cabaret, brought the grotesque march to a halt in front of Peter Roger, his knights, and their ladies.Simon de Montfort, the new master of Carcassonne, had begun the campaign of 1210. The soldiers of Christ were once again on the move.
Quote ID: 6577
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 106
Section: 3A2A
Pope Innocent had made it a crime not only to be a heretic but also to tolerate the presence of heretics in the community.
Quote ID: 6578
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 109
Section: 3A2A
...for the pope renewed the call for a crusade every year.
Quote ID: 6579
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 109
Section: 2D3B,3A2A
The Perfect ran from the contagion of violence. Such horrors as Beziers and Bram strengthened their belief that the Church of Rome was illegitimate. The institution violated its own laws.
Quote ID: 6580
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 109
Section: 3A2B
The crusaders destroyed vineyards, burned crops, took what was not theirs.
Quote ID: 6581
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 119
Section: 3A1
A zealous bureaucracy dedicated to elaborating canon law had expanded, for Rome’s aim was nothing less than to codify, and thereby control, the affairs of a continent. Even the disgraceful Fourth Crusade had been turned to Innocent’s advantage. The sack of Constantinople led to the installation of a Latin patriarch in the episcopal palace of Byzantium. For the first time in centuries, all of Christendom genuflected toward Rome.
Quote ID: 6582
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 123
Section: 3A2A
Heavily armed, they launched nighttime attacks on the houses of prominent Jews and Cathars. Arson became respectable, almost sacramental.
Quote ID: 6583
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 131
Section: 3A2A
After hanging her brother, Simon de Montfort had Geralda thrown down a well, then stoned to death. Even by the standards of the day, the act was shocking.
Quote ID: 6584
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 131
Section: 3A2A
As Fulk’s White Brotherhood sang a Te Deum, the Cathars were marched to the riverside and burned, in the largest bonfire of humanity of the Middle Ages.
Quote ID: 6585
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 144
Section: 2E1,3A2A
Simon ignored the worried looks from his entourage and rode with recovered dignity to the hundreds of knights waiting in the lower town. Bishop Fulk appeared with a relic, a chunk of wood from the True Cross, and implored the soldiers of Christ to kneel and kiss it.
Quote ID: 6586
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 144
Section: 2E1,3A2A,2A3
Horses and men grew impatient. A bishop from the Pyrenees grabbed the relic from Fulk’s hands and gave a collective blessing to the assembly, assuring that those who had died in battle would go directly to heaven.
Quote ID: 6587
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 151
Section: 3A1
Given the pope’s theocratic bent, the assembly not only defined dogma but also legislated on the secular affairs of Europe.
Quote ID: 6588
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 151
Section: 3A1
The Fourteenth Lateran Council was the clearest expression of Innocent’s quest to be the shepherd of European destiny.
Quote ID: 6589
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 153
Section: 3A2A
It is impossible to conceive of a worse place for a suspected heretic to linger than in the biggest convention of churchmen of the Middle Ages.
Quote ID: 6590
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 155
Section: 3A2A
The venomous debate was adjourned by the pontiff. He had at last seen for himself what his zeal for crusade had wrought. The Christians of Languedoc hated each other and were unafraid to shout out their hatred in the holiest halls of Christendom.
Quote ID: 6591
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 163
Section: 3A2A
The senior churchman in Simon’s company, remembering Beziers, exhorted the northerners to “let neither man nor woman escape alive.”
Quote ID: 6594
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 181
Section: 3A1
The English realm, recovering from the disastrous reign of King John, was in the throes of baronial revolt. (Indeed, in 1216, Louis had briefly accepted the crown of England at the invitation of the barons, until the pope stepped in and excommunicated him.)
Quote ID: 6596
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 183
Section: 3A1,3A4C
...now he was the person of the king, the repository of almost sacramental power. To defy him and his powerful army was to be both doomed and damned.
Quote ID: 6597
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 184
Section: 3A1,4B
As the French poured over the borders of Languedoc, Louis received fawning letters of obeisance from many local nobles. “It has come to our knowledge that our lord cardinal has decreed that all the land of the count of Toulouse shall be annexed to your domain,” one letter stated. “We rejoice from the bottom or our hearts...and we are impatient to be in the shadow of your wings and under your wise dominion.”
Quote ID: 6598
Time Periods: 47
Book ID: 261 Page: 187
Section: 3A1,3A2A
Twenty years earlier, Count Raymond VI of Toulouse had staggered up the steps of the church at St. Gilles, his public penance coinciding with the start of the Albigensian Crusade. Now, on April 12, 1229, it was the turn of his son, Raymond VII, to receive the same humiliating treatment, this time to mark the end of the crusade. Just as before, a papal legate handled the switch, bringing the twigs down on the mortified flesh of the nobleman.
Quote ID: 6599
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 189
Section: 2E1
She had done not man’s work but Christ’s. Beside her on this memorable Holy Thursday stood her eldest son, Louis. Once grown to manhood, the boy, as King Louis IX, would become the most devout monarch of Europe, eventually earning sainthood for his death on crusade near Tunis.
Quote ID: 6600
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 261 Page: 189
Section: 2E1
Across the island from Notre Dame, he would erect the Gothic masterpiece of the Sainte Chapelle, an exquisite stone reliquary for the treasures he had bought from wily traders: a vial of the Virgin’s milk, the crown of thorns, and dozens of other costly frauds peddled to the credulous crusader king. In watching the spectacle of Raymond VII’s humiliation, the twelve-year-old future saint may have acquired his taste for devotional brio.
Quote ID: 6601
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 261 Page: 191
Section: 3A1,3A2A
On August 5, 1234, a wealthy old lady of Toulouse said on her deathbed that she wanted to make a good end. Her servants scuttled down the stairs and out into the street. They had to find a Perfect, hidden somewhere in the attics and cellars of the city. . . . The servants made cautious inquiries at the houses of those who quietly shared the old lady’s faith. In time, they returned with what they were seeking - a Perfect, who administered the consolamentum to the ailing woman, then left as stealthily as he had come.
Quote ID: 6602
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 192/193
Section: 3A2A
The dying woman’s in-laws, the Borsier family, had long ago fallen under suspicion of heresy. One of them whispered a warning to the sickbed, telling the dying woman that the “Lord Bishop” had arrived.She apparently misunderstood, for she addressed Raymond du Fauga, the Catholic bishop, as if he were Guilhabert of Castres, the Cathar Perfect.
Bishop Raymond did not correct her mistake. Instead, he pretended to be the Cathar holy man, so that the woman would damn herself all the more thoroughly. As the others in the room watched, Raymond questioned her at length, eliciting from her a full profession of her heretical faith. He stood over the bed and, according to Pelhisson, exhorted the woman to remain true to her beliefs. “The fear of death should not make you confess anything other than that which you hold firmly and with your whole heart,” the bishop advised with mock concern for her soul. When the woman agreed, he revealed his true identity and pronounced her an unrepentant heretic subject to immediate execution.
Since she was too feeble to move on her own, the woman was lashed to her bed. It was carried downstairs and into the street. Raymond led the curious procession past his cathedral and into a field beyond the city gates. A bonfire had been lit in expectation of their arrival. News of the spectacle spread throughout Toulouse. A large crowd assembled, then watched, openmouthed, as a barely conscious woman, with just hours left in her natural life, was thrown into the flames.
“This done,” the Dominican eyewitness noted, “the bishop, together with the monks and their attendants, returned to the refectory and, after giving thanks to God and St. Dominic, fell cheerfully upon the food set before them.”
Quote ID: 6603
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 193
Section: 3A2A
The papacy of Gregory IX, begun in 1227, marked a fevered new departure in the race to silence dissent. The notion of a permanent papal, as opposed to an episcopal, heresy tribunal began to gain ground.
Quote ID: 6604
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 261 Page: 198
Section: 3A2A
A person suspected of Cathar sympathies was not always informed of the charges hanging over his head; if apprised of the danger, he had not right to know who his accusers were; and if he dared seek outside legal help, his unfortunate lawyer was then charged with abetting heresy.
Quote ID: 6607
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 198
Section: 3A2A
The inquisitor hereticae pravitatis (inquisitor of heretical depravity) tore apart the bonds of trust that hold civil society together. Informing on one’s neighbor became not only a duty but also a survival strategy.
Quote ID: 6608
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 199
Section: 3A2A
The Inquisition was interested in names - in compiling an inventory of the network of Catharism that had survived the crusade.
Quote ID: 6609
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 261 Page: 199/200
Section: 2A3,3A2A
When pressed, as ever, to name names, the craftier credentes gave a long list of the deceased, thereby fulfilling their obligation to finger as many people as possible while sparing the living the perils of punishment.The inquisitors had an answer to this tactic. They dug up and burned the dead. To the stupefaction of friends and family, cemeteries were turned upside down and decomposing corpses carted through the streets to the burning ground as priests cried, “Qui aytal fara, aytal pendra” (Whoso does the like, will suffer a like fate). These macabre bonfires were just the beginning. If the flaming cadaver had been notorious for lodging a Perfect, his house was razed, regardless of who happened to be occupying it.
Quote ID: 6610
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 200
Section: 2A3,3A2A
The Dominicans were hated. In Albi, the inquisitor Arnold Cathala was beaten to within an inch of his life when he began disinterring bodies.
Quote ID: 6611
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 200
Section: 3A2A
At Moissac, a pilgrimage center on the Garonne, where the inquisitors Peter Seila and William Arnald nonetheless managed to burn 210 of the living, heretics were hidden by compassionate Cistercian monks.
Quote ID: 6612
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 200
Section: 3A2A
No one was safe unless he did harm to his neighbors.
Quote ID: 6613
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 201
Section: 3A2A
One day in 1233, a working man named John Textor, according to the chronicle of William Pelhisson, yelled out into a street of Toulouse as he was being questioned by the Inquisition: “Gentlemen, listen to me! I am not a heretic, for I have a wife and sleep with her. I have sons, I eat meat, I lie and swear, and I am a faithful Christian. So don’t let them say these things about me, for I truly believe in God. They can accuse you as well as me. Look out for yourselves, for these wicked men want to ruin the town and honest men and take the town away from its lord.”
Quote ID: 6614
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 202
Section: 2A3,3A2A
Seila and Arnald wasted no time in making enemies. On receiving their papal commission in 1233, they had immediately targeted one of the most prominent Perfect in Toulouse, Vigoros of Bacone. Before his many allies and friends could rally to his defense, Vigoros was tried, convicted, and burned. There followed an unseemly two-year binge of body exhuming, coupled with sweeping imprisonments. To do the actual physical work of arresting, jailing, and executing, the two friars had to force the secular authority of Toulouse to do their bidding, by threatening prosecution of all who dared defy them. Refusing to obey the Inquisition was, according to Rome, as much a spiritual crime as heresy. Therefore it fell within the jurisdiction of Church, not secular courts. The successful inquisitor used the full panoply of clerical intimidation - threat of excommunication, interdict, dispossession - to obtain the armed men necessary to do his job.
Quote ID: 6615
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 218
Section: 3A2A
Then there were the Perfect, for whom no clemency was possible. The Albigensian Crusade and the Inquisition in Languedoc had established one dark, immutable axiom: To dedicate one’s life to a Christian creed outside the bounds of medieval orthodoxy was a capital crime.
Quote ID: 6616
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 220/221
Section: 3A2A
The 220 or so condemned walked past the last patches of snow on the brown winter grass until they reached a palisade of logs. Friend and enemy looked on. The leaders of the Cathar faith, barefoot and clad only in coarse robes, climbed the ladders propped up against the wooden walls. Groups of them were lashed together, their backs to the tall stakes sticking up from the colossal bier. At a sign from the archbishop, his men threw burning brands into the enclosure. The low murmur of prayers was overtaken by the crackling sound of flame, spreading underfoot, curling the first of the fiery twigs and setting the hems of garments alight. Within minutes, the crackling had become one great oceanic roar.By midmorning, a choking black nimbus billowed through the ravines and valleys leading from Montsegur. Shepherds on nearby hills would have seen it rise slowly, heavy with the stench of fear and pain and man’s inhumanity to God. The wind took the cloud and, as it had done so long at at Beziers, lifted it high into the skies of Languedoc. The particles of smoke drifted and dispersed, then disappeared.
Quote ID: 6617
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 223
Section: 2D3B
As for the Church’s pretensions to equity, Garcias looked back at the bloody recent past, then enunciated a view that is still ahead of its time: “Justice cannot condemn a man to death. An official who judges someone a heretic and has him put to death is a murderer. God did not want a justice of death sentences. It is not right to go on a crusade...against the Saracens, or against a village like Montsegur that opposed the Church...The preachers of crusades are criminals.”
Quote ID: 6618
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 230
Section: 3A2A
...in 1278, more than 200 Perfect were burned in Verona.
Quote ID: 6619
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 230
Section: 3A2A
By century’s end, only the truly heroic dared to say aloud that the world was evil.
Quote ID: 6620
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 230/231
Section: 2E4
The year 1300 saw the papacy institute the jubilee, the greatest occasion for raising funds and consciousness ever devised in the Middle Ages.* Pope Benedict VIII, the most ambitious and abrasive pontiff since Innocent III, declared that pilgrims to Rome that year would receive a raft of spiritual indulgence so ample as to render future damnation an utter fluke. Somewhere between one and two million people accepted his offer, an army of the anxious faithful from all over Europe, crossing the Alps on foot and horseback, docking at ports on the Adriatic and the Tyrrhenian, ready to open wide their hearts and purses once in sight of the holy city on the Tiber. The clergy and merchants of Rome exulted.
Quote ID: 6621
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 232
Section: 2A6
Peter must have repeatedly bitten his tongue at these pious moments, for he would later say that making the sign of the cross was useful only for batting away flies. He even suggested alternate wording for the gesture: “Here is the forehead and here is the beard and here is one ear and here is the other.”
Quote ID: 6622
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 261 Page: 233
Section: 3A2A
In Carcasonne, plots were hatched to destroy Inquisition registers; in the hands of unscrupulous bishops and friars, these bound volumes of confession and betrayal had become tools of blackmail and extortion.
Quote ID: 6623
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 233
Section: 3A2A
The incendiary friar, who went so far as to claim that inquisitors simply made up confessions of fictitious people in order to blackmail the innocent.....
Quote ID: 6624
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 238
Section: 3A2A
In April 1310, the inquisitors hauled him up in front of the cathedral of St. Stephen in Toulouse and burned him alive. His last wish, which he reportedly cried out as he was being tied to the stake, was to be given a chance to preach to the huge crowd of onlookers. In no time, Peter Autier declared defiantly, he would convert them all. The request was denied.
Quote ID: 6625
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 246
Section: 3A2A
Arnold became a rich man. After more than a century of double-dealing - the violated safe-conduct offered to Raymond Roger Trencavel, the perjury trap set by Arnold Amaury, the hostage-taking of Toulouse’s ambassadors by Bishop Fulk, the burning of the dying woman by Bishop Raymond du Fauga, the eaves-dropping on Peter Garcias, the sellout of the convert Sicard of Lunel, and the thousands upon thousands of betrayals coaxed, threatened, or tortured out of simple, pious people by more than eight decades of implacable Inquisition - Catholic orthodoxy had found in Arnold Sicre a champion of treachery.
Quote ID: 6626
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 272
Section: 2C
A Perfect is so called not because he or she is flawless; rather, one so labeled is a hereticus perfectus or heretica perfecta - “a completed heretic,” in the sense of one who has passed from the stage of sympathizer to the rank of the ordained. I have elected to capitalize the term so it will not be confused with the ordinary sense of “perfect”.
Quote ID: 6627
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 273/274
Section: 3A2A
To the average Languedoc peasant, no doubt the Cathar holy men and women seem to be completely orthodox in their piety, more orthodox than the village priest living with his concubine.
Quote ID: 6629
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 275/276
Section: 3A2A
Perhaps the strangest incident of heresy detection in the twelfth century occurred near Rheims, when a cleric named Gervase of Tilbury, out riding with the archbishop and some senior prelates, spotted a pretty girl working alone in a vineyard. A chronicler, Ralph of Coggeshall, relates: “Moved by the lewd curiosity of a young man, as I heard from him myself after he had become a canon, he went over to her. He greeted her, and asked politely where she came from, and who her parents were, and what she was doing there alone, and then, when he had eyed her beauty for a while, spoke gallantly to her of the delights of love-making.” She turned him down, saying that she would always remain a virgin. His suspicions now aroused as well, Gervase learned that the peasant girl believed, on heretical religious grounds, that her body must not be corrupted. He tried to get her to change her mind, in the timeless manner of one who will not take no for an answer. Their arguing finally attracted the attention of the archbishop, who rode over and soon became scandalized. Not by Gervase’s conduct, but by the girl’s faith. He had her arrested and brought back to Rheims for questioning. The farm girl refused to recant, and she was burned. (Source: R.I. Moore, The Birth of Popular Heresy, pp. 86-88.)
Quote ID: 6630
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 277
Section: 2C,3A1
the pontiff’s superiority over all the crowned heads of Christendom: The chutzpah of Gregory VII can still take one’s breath away. In a volume of his correspondence, historians found a list that contains the following statements: “The pope can be judged by no one; the Roman church has never erred and never will err till the end of time; the Roman church was founded by Christ alone; the pope alone can depose and restore bishops; he alone can make new laws, set up new bishoprics, and divide old ones; he alone can translate bishops; he alone can call general councils and authorize canon law; he alone can revise his own judgments; he alone can use the imperial insignia; he can depose emperors; he can absolve subjects from their allegiance; all princes should kiss his feet” (source: R. W. Southern, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages, p. 102).
Quote ID: 6631
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 277
Section: 2E1,2A3
A lot of relics came on the market following the crusader sack of Constantinople in 1204; thus some of the objects listed...….
For example, Enrico Dandolo, the wily old doge of Venice, brought back from Constantinople the lions that stand in front of St. Mark’s, as well as a piece of the True Cross, the arm of St. George, a vial of Christ’s blood, and a chunk of John the Baptist’s head (source: Marc Kaplan, “Le sac de Constantinople,” in Les Croisades, ed. R. Delort).
Quote ID: 6632
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 261 Page: 280
Section: 3A2A
Raymond IV of Toulouse wrote to the pope of the holy massacre perpetrated by his crusaders on storming the mosques and synagogues of Jerusalem in 1099: “And if you desire to know what was done with the enemy who were found there, know that in Solomon’s Porch and in his temple our men rode in the blood of the Saracens up to the knees of their horses.” Christian sources put the number of victims at 10,000; Arab sources claim 100,000 were killed. (Source: Friedrich Heer, The Medieval World, p. 135.)
Quote ID: 6633
Time Periods: 7
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