The Albigensian Crusade was a war launched by the papacy to combat Cathar heresy. Growing increasingly powerful in Languedoc, the Cathars believed that the Church governed by the Pope was corrupt and incapable of fighting the Evil that ruled the earthly world. Responding to the call of Innocent III, knights from Northern France and adventurers rushed into Occitania.
Marked by sieges, pitched battles, massacres, hangings, pyres, and destruction, this crusade against the Albigensians failed to achieve its declared purpose and devolved into a straightforward war of conquest benefiting the crown of France: it laid the groundwork for the annexation of all of Languedoc.
The Albigensian Heresy
As in the early centuries of Christianity, many heresies began to emerge from the 11th century onward. While many were quickly suppressed, some gained considerable prominence.
The word “heresy” comes from a Greek term that simply means “choice.” The official Church labeled those Christians who had “chosen” to follow a way of life different from that of the Catholic clergy and thought, on certain points of dogma, differently from what the Church required, as “heretics.” These individuals were treated as criminals punishable by death. In short, they were nonconformists, dissidents, all the more dangerous in the eyes of the Holy See because they based their faith solely on the New Testament, claiming to be Christians, living as Christians, and even asserting that they were the one true Church of Christ.
Such was the case with the so-called “Albigensian” heresy (named because it spread first and foremost in the region of Albi). It was inspired by an ancient Persian religion and taught the existence of two opposing principles, Good and Evil, the former being the aura of a good creator God, the latter that of Satan, whom Christianity viewed as nothing more than a fallen rebel angel. This Albigensian doctrine was accompanied by a very austere moral code, but only the “perfects” or Cathars (meaning the pure) were bound to observe it. They had received the consolamentum, while the mass of the faithful (believers or “imperfects”) only received it at the point of death.
The heresy made rapid progress because the Languedocian clergy led a scandalous existence and poorly compared to the Cathars. To combat it, Pope Innocent III initially sought to rely solely on preaching and encouraged the efforts of Saint Dominic.
Why “Albigensian”?
In 1179, the Third Lateran Council denounced “the heretics of Gascony, Albigensians, the Toulouse region, and other places, who are sometimes called Cathars, sometimes Patarins, sometimes publicans or otherwise…” Very quickly, it is unclear why, under the pen of chroniclers as well as the clerks of the papal chancery, the term “Albigensian” came to designate, even far from Albi, the heretics who had settled in the 12th and 13th centuries between Agen and the Mediterranean, and who are today more appropriately referred to as “Cathars” due to the overly narrow geographical connotation of the word “Albigensian.”
The 1179 Council had called upon the armed force available to the lords of the region against the Occitan Cathars. As these lords, from the modest minor noble of the Lauragais countryside to the counts of Toulouse and Foix, publicly protected the Cathar communities established in the towns and villages, and often had one or more “perfect heretics” (hereticus perfectus) in their family, the Church’s appeals remained a dead letter.
The Crusade Against the Albigensians
A crusade is a holy war, meaning, in the context of medieval Western Europe, a war waged in the name of the religion of Christ. This was the case for the expeditions undertaken in the Holy Land against the infidels, which served as a model for the one the Holy See launched against the Occitan Cathars. It is also because they are part of the militia Christi, the army of Christ, that those who engage in such a war sew a cross onto their cloak and are called crusaders.
Elected in 1198, Pope Innocent III decided to immediately establish the military intervention that he believed would be the only solution to the Cathar question. However, as he found no one in Occitan territory willing to take up arms, he was forced to call for a foreign army: he then preached the crusade throughout Christian Europe, especially in France and neighboring countries. A massive army, mainly French, set out in the spring of 1209.
Given that, over twenty years of war, the Roman Church was unable to eradicate Occitan Catharism, while the French crown reaped significant benefits from this operation by annexing half of the County of Toulouse, what would later be called Lower Languedoc, and by establishing legal means to annex the other half—Upper Languedoc—in the medium term, it has often been questioned whether the “holy war” was not a false pretext and whether it was, in fact, a guise for French conquest.
However, it is now known, thanks to the correspondence he exchanged with Innocent III, that King Philip Augustus did not want this crusade. He refused, despite the pope’s pleas, to lead it and even forbade his son, the future Louis VIII, and his great barons from taking the cross.
But the assassination of the papal legate Pierre de Castelnau in Saint-Gilles in January 1208 removed the last obstacles. In response to this sacrilegious act, which the Church attributed to Count Raymond VI of Toulouse, the pressure from the high clergy of France was such that Philip Augustus had to agree to let his vassals take the cross—while refusing to take it himself and to involve his son in the operation. If he could not prevent the crusade, at least the King of France delayed it by ten years…
The Early Successes of the Crusaders
Innocent III “exposed” the lands of the Occitan princes suspected of tolerating the Cathars on their domains, first and foremost the Count of Toulouse and his nephew the young Raymond-Roger Trencavel, Viscount of Béziers, Carcassonne, Albi, and Razès. He offered their lands and titles “to any good Catholic who wishes to seize them.”
July 1209: Béziers refuses to open its gates to the crusaders who have poured into Languedoc through the Rhône Valley. Then they launch an assault. Carcassonne is subsequently besieged, and Trencavel is captured by treachery and assassinated. His titles and lands are given by the papal legate, Abbot Arnaud Amaury of Cîteaux, to a lord from Île-de-France, Simon de Montfort, who becomes the military leader of the invading army.
The Church triumphs. But this does not bode well for the suzerain of Carcassonne: the King of Aragon, Peter II, a Catholic sovereign, since he himself is a vassal of the Holy See!
The establishment of a French lord in Occitan territory, at the head of an entire French chivalry to whom he will distribute the conquered fiefs, poses a serious threat to the crown of Aragon: it marks the end of the geopolitical balance it has established in the northern Pyrenees since Raymond VI and his son each married a sister of the king. The latter even signed an alliance treaty with the Count of Toulouse in 1204 “against any man in the world.” However, occupied by the war that Aragon and Castile were waging against the Muslims in Spain, Peter II could not intervene in Languedoc.
For nine years, Montfort rode through the land. He massacred, ravaged, and plundered—even the Abbey of Moissac!—and built huge pyres for the Cathars he captured. He distributed lordships to his companions. He conquered Albi, Agen, Quercy, and Rouergue. He waged war on lands where there had never been heretics: Comminges, Bigorre, Béarn, Provence…
Occitan and Aragonese Resistance
In July 1212, the victory at Las Navas de Tolosa over the Almohads finally freed King Peter II of Aragon’s hands. He rushed to the aid of the Occitans and had himself recognized in Toulouse as suzerain and protector of all the lands threatened by the crusade.
Unfortunately for the latter, due to a lack of a unified command and effective tactics, the great coalition uniting the Catalans and Aragonese with the Counts of Toulouse, Comminges, and Foix was routed in the plain of Muret on September 12, 1213, by Simon de Montfort’s heavy cavalry. Peter II even lost his life in the battle… Victorious, Montfort was proclaimed Count of Toulouse by the Holy See in place of Raymond VI, who was deposed and condemned to exile; but the conqueror died in 1218, his skull crushed by a catapult stone while besieging rebellious Toulouse.
His son Amaury succeeded him… Brave but too young and inexperienced, he could not withstand the liberation war led by Raymond VI and his son Raymond VII, by the Count of Foix, and by all their vassals. One by one, he lost his father’s vast conquests and, besieged in Carcassonne in January 1224, he surrendered and returned to France with the last remnants of his loyal followers. The Montfort crusade was defeated.
The End of the Albigensian Crusade
The Cathars who escaped the pyres resettled in the liberated territory. Then the Holy See launched a second crusade in 1226, led this time by the new King of France himself, Louis VIII. He understood all the benefits that the Crown could gain from the operation…
The land, drained of resources by seventeen years of war, collapsed. Raymond VII was forced to sign the Treaty of Paris in 1229, which annexed to the royal domain, besides the former Viscounty of Trencavel, half of his States: all his lands in Lower Languedoc facing the Mediterranean. His daughter Jeanne was forcibly married to a brother of Louis IX. The next Count of Toulouse would thus be a Capetian. And the treaty stipulated that upon his death, if he had no children, the entire county would return to the king…
This is what happened in 1271. This is why, since then, Languedoc has been French. As for the heresy, twenty years of crusade having resolved nothing at all, the Holy See soon established a new means of repression: the Inquisition… However, it took almost a century for it to overcome the extraordinary underground resistance of the banned religion: the last perfect Cathar, Guilhem Bélibaste, was not captured and burned until 1321…