The Cathars

by Sean Martin

  Jacob Bech’s confession, however, makes it clear that not all of the Piedmont Cathars entertained notions about dragons – he was taught the more orthodox Cathar view that material creation was under the sway of Satan, and he also told the Inquisition of links between the Piedmont Cathars and Ecclesia Sclavoniae, which were apparently still active at that time. Indeed, Bech claimed to have been converted by two Italian Cathars and a third individual from ‘Sclavonia’, and that the Balkan heretics had their own pope.104 Before that, Bech had been a member of various heretical groups, including the Apostolics, and his travels had taken him as far as Rome and Avignon. At one point, he had even been given money by a well-wisher to cross the Adriatic to seek further instruction from Balkan heretics, but was unable to make the crossing due to inclement weather. In time, Bech himself began to gather disciples, and at Castagnole he was honoured with a feast. When he was asked about the consolamentum, Bech corroborated Galosna with reference to the euthanasia by suffocation, but added that the consoled had another option, that of a complete three-day fast, in which they could not even take that staple of the endura, cold water. If they survived, they would become Perfect, but would have to give all their worldly goods to the one who had consoled them. Bech told the Inquisition that he had settled in Chieri, where moderate Catharism was rife, and that a number of other Cathars had gone from there to Bosnia for further instruction.105 Both Galosna and Bech were burnt, and Catharism in the west effectively died with them.

  In 1412, the Inquisition returned to Chieri and dug up 15 dead Cathars – some of whom had been named by Bech as having journeyed to Bosnia – and burnt their remains. There were apparently no Cathars left alive, although the Inquisition acknowledged that the heresy was still rife across the Adriatic.

  The Enigma of the Bosnian Church

  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. At length, Innocent’s chaplain, John de Casamaris, was sent to investigate. Ban Kulin rejected all accusations of heresy, and pointed out to John that he had just built a church that celebrated a recent military victory. However, Christianity in Bosnia was underdeveloped, and it is possible that Ban Kulin was not aware of where orthodoxy ended and heresy began. As a precaution, seven senior leaders from various monastic communities submitted to Roman rule at Bilino Polje on 8 April 1203 before Ban Kulin and the papal legate. On 30 April, the ceremony was repeated on an island off Csepel in the Danube south of Budapest, only this time the seven priors made their submission in front of Ban Kulin, Emeric, king of Hungary, and senior Hungarian churchmen. In addition to submitting to the rule of the Church, the Bosnians were made to agree not to receive anyone they suspected of being a ‘Manichaean’.

  Despite this, the heresy situation in Bosnia continued to worry successive popes. In 1232, it was discovered that the Catholic bishop of Bosnia was an uneducated simoniac who not only did not know how to baptise, but also lived in the same village as heretics.106 He was removed from office and replaced by a Dominican. It became clear to Gregory IX that a military solution was necessary. He appointed the king of Hungary to lead Crusades against the Bosnian heretics, and campaigns were mounted between 1234 and 1246, which saw a number of heretics being burnt. Following the death of Ban Ninoslav around 1250, Bosnia was forced to accept Hungarian rule.

  This seems to have been a major turning point in Bosnian religious affairs. While the Crusades were attempts to extirpate heresy, they ultimately backfired, as it was under Hungarian suzerainty that the Bosnian Church was probably founded; it is still a matter for debate, and records are scarce for the period. Little seems to have been done to check heresy; the Dominicans were driven out and their convents burnt down. Elisabeth, the mother of the boy king of Hungary, Ladislas (1272–90), promised Pope Nicholas III in 1280 that she would take measures against the heretics, but it is not known if these measures achieved anything. It is unlikely they did, as, by the time the Bosnian Church emerged again into the historical record, around 1322, it was condemned by both Rome and the Serbian Orthodox Church as heretical.

  The precise nature of the Bosnian Church’s heresy remains a matter for speculation. That its members were known as Patarenes – the name for Cathars in Italy – suggests a Catharist orientation. Furthermore, the Church used a ritual that was very similar to the consolamentum and included the giveaway phrase ‘supersubstantial bread’ in the Lord’s Prayer, a further strong suggestion that the Bosnian Church was either Cathar, semi-Cathar or at least tolerated Cathar practices within it.

  In 1325, Pope John XXII (1316–34) exhorted a number of leaders to take action against the Bosnian Church, as ‘many heretics’ were flooding into Bosnia. His successor knew all about heresy, as he was none other than the bishop of Pamiers, James Fournier, who ruled as Benedict II (1334–42), but even he was unable to get a Crusade in motion. The most headway that the Catholic Church was able to make was in the sending of a Franciscan mission to Bosnia, but Stephen Kotromani, Ban 1318–53, remained tolerant of the Bosnian Church, and there were no persecutions. He remained on good terms with the Franciscans, and converted to Catholicism. Heretics remained unpersecuted under Stephen’s successor, his nephew, Tvrtko I (1353–91), so much so that the Franciscans complained that ‘Patarenes’ were allowed into church when they said mass, and the support for the heretics was so great that the Franciscans almost had to practise their religion in secret.

  Heretics long remained in positions of prominence in Bosnia, and were even sent on diplomatic missions, such as those to Dubrovnik – then an independent republic – in the first half of the fifteenth century. (Indeed, a merchant from Dubrovnik noted in 1458 that the Bosnians ‘follow Manichee customs’.107) The last great gosti – or elder – of the Bosnian Church, Radin, enjoyed a long and successful parallel career as a diplomat, serving both the Bosnian monarchy and Dubrovnik. When he drew up his will in 1466, he drew sharp distinction between members of the Bosnian Church and Catholics, although that did not stop him bequeathing money to the latter.

  The increasing threat from the Ottoman Turks led the Bosnian king, Stephen Thomas (1443–61), to appeal to the west for help. To increase his chances of receiving support, he converted to Catholicism and began to persecute the Bosnian Church, a move that made him extremely unpopular with his subjects. Members of the Church were offered the choice of conversion or exile. Some of Radin’s community were given asylum in Dubrovnik and Venice, while others chose to defy their king and collaborate with the Ottomans. Bosnia fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1463, but the fate of those members of the Bosnian Church who did not go into exile remains obscure. They are traditionally thought to have converted to Islam, although there are reports of Bogomils, Patarenes and Manichaeans in Bosnia well into the nineteenth century; the last known report dates from 1867.108 It is perhaps fitting that the Great Heresy, which emerged seemingly from nowhere during the tenth century, should have an equally obscure and mysterious end.

  7

  The Cathar Treasure

  Since their demise, many legends have circulated about the Cathars, usually centring around the so-called Cathar Treasure, and their relationship with the Troubadours and the Knights Templar. Much of this is the result of the romanticisation of Catharism by nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers such as Napoléon Peyrat and Déodat Roché, whose work we will examine later in this chapter. However, such legends have actually been circulating since at least the 1320s,109 and deserve to be briefly outlined below, as they have played a crucial role in shaping the mystique surrounding the Cathars, which has in turn helped retain the interest and imagination of the public, speculative historians and mystics for generations.

  The Cathars and the Holy Grail

  Perhaps the most enduring myth about the Cathars is t
hat they possessed the Holy Grail, the cup said to have been used by Christ at the Last Supper, which also caught drops of his blood at the Crucifixion. Although, as will be noted below, modern writers have managed to get a great deal of mileage out of the Grail, they did not invent the Cathar/Grail myth. It originated in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, while Catharism was still very much alive.

  These Grail stories began in the city of Troyes, courtesy of the quill of Chrétien de Troyes; his Conte del Graal, written around 1180, is the first mediaeval Grail narrative.110 It concerns the attempts of King Arthur’s knights to attain the Grail, but, due to Chrétien’s death, it breaks off before the quest is completed. The story was picked up by Robert de Boron, whose Joseph of Arimathea (c. 1200) Christianises the story, and then by Wolfram von Eschenbach. Wolfram’s greatest work is Parzival (c. 1200–1210), which is frequently read as an allegory of spiritual development, betraying the influence of the east (Wolfram was thought to have gone on Crusade) and also of alchemy. In Wolfram’s poem, the Grail castle is called Munsalvaesche, which some (see below) have taken as a coded reference to Montségur, as both names have the same meaning, ‘safe, or secure, mountain.’ Wolfram continued to write about the Grail in the unfinished Titurel, which was fleshed out and completed by Albrecht von Scharfenberg. Albrecht’s poem, Jüngerer Titurel (c. 1272), seems to be making a direct link between the Grail and the Cathars, when he names the first king of the Holy Grail ‘Perilla’. This is the Latinised version of the name of Montségur’s lord, Raymond Pereille. Why does Albrecht make this link? Coincidence? Literary fashion? Or did he know some secret about the Cathars, whose existence he wanted to hint at in the poem?

  Speculative writers argue there was indeed a secret: the Cathars possessed the Grail, and draw attention to one dramatic event that seems to corroborate this. During the siege of Montségur, either just before the two-week truce in March 1244, or during it, four Cathars scaled down the mountain in the dead of night, carrying with them a ‘treasure’, which was then either hidden in a nearby cave, given to other Cathar groups, or entrusted to the Knights Templar. Whatever this treasure was, it had to be portable enough to be carried down a precipitous mountainside, and a chalice would certainly fit the bill. Montségur’s sergeant, Imbert of Salles, however, told the Inquisition that the Cathar Treasure was merely money and precious stones.111 But stories about secret hordes of Cathar treasure persisted. Some held that the treasure was simply vast amounts of money, hidden at various locations, while others argued that the treasure could be nothing so mundane or vulgar, that it comprised secret texts or sacred documents, containing divine wisdom and revelatory truths. Conveniently for the myth, the four Cathars disappeared from history, taking the treasure with them.

  Although the Grail is usually depicted as a cup (sometimes a platter), Wolfram’s grail, in Parzival, was said to be a stone, which recalls the Philosopher’s Stone in alchemy. However, there have been alternative interpretations of the Grail. One of the more controversial suggestions is that the Grail is, in fact, the womb of Mary Magdalene, which was seen as the chalice that caught Christ’s blood not on Calvary but after the wedding at Cana, at which Jesus and the Magdalene became man and wife, after which they raised a family. The Magdalene hypothesis suggests that the Holy Grail, which is san graal in French, is, in fact, a misspelling of sang real, the holy blood, meaning the bloodline of Jesus and the Magdalene. This theory has most famously been explored in Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln’s classic The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. 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 least, as the Cathars despised marriage. Furthermore, it was not a belief inherited from the Bogomils. It is possible, in believing that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married, that the Cathars were reflecting a popular Languedocian tradition, but we cannot be certain.

  The Troubadours and the Knights Templar

  The two groups with whom the Cathars are most often associated are the Troubadours and the Knights Templar, both of whom had a very strong presence in the Languedoc during the thirteenth century. The Troubadours were itinerant poets writing in Occitan who flourished between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. In Germany, they had fellow travellers in the shape of the Minnesingers, of whom Wolfram von Eschenbach was one. The Troubadours’ main themes were chivalry and courtly love, in which the virtues of a particular lady would be extolled by the poet. Sometimes these were literal love songs, often addressed to a woman who was unattainable, while other Troubadour poems and songs were in fact allegories of spiritual development, and betray an awareness of the Divine Feminine. Among the most celebrated Troubadours were Peter Vidal, William Figueira and Jaufré Rudel. In the Languedoc, they enjoyed the protection of the same families which protected the Cathars. At least one Troubadour, William de Durfort, was known to be a Cathar; no doubt there were others. The concept of the Divine Feminine suggests another link between the two movements: the Perfect, upon being consoled, were given the title of Theotokos, which means ‘God-Bearer’, an assignation usually associated with the Virgin Mary.

  The Knights Templar were the most powerful military religious order of their day, and were major landowners in the Languedoc. While theories suggesting that the Cathar treasure – whatever its nature – was entrusted to the Templars remain fanciful, there are a number of more definite links between the heretics and the soldier-monks. One of the Templars’ great Grand Masters, Bertrand de Blancfort, was said to have come from a Cathar family, and during the Albigensian Crusade, the Templars welcomed fugitive Cathars into the order. In some Templar preceptories in the Languedoc, Cathars outnumbered Catholics. Furthermore, the Templars refused to participate in the Albigensian Crusade. There could have been a number of reasons for this. They had a great deal of support in the Languedoc, so any military intervention there would have been politically disastrous for the Order, and, towards the end of the de Montfort years, they were actively involved in the Fifth Crusade (1217–21), in which they played a decisive role. However, one cannot help but wonder if certain elements within the Temple remained sympathetic to the Cathars, a sympathy rendered all the more plausible by the fact that the Templars were themselves viciously suppressed between 1307 and 1312, on charges of heresy, blasphemy and sodomy – charges that had been formerly levelled against the Good Christians.113

  Modern Cathars

  The romanticisation of the Cathars began with the Languedocian writer Napoléon Peyrat (1809–81). Despite being a priest himself, he was also a member of an anticlerical group known as the Priest Eaters, and launched numerous attacks on what he saw as the reactionary nature of the Catholic Church. To bolster his arguments, he invoked the name of the Cathars, whom he regarded as southern martyrs. His mammoth History of the Albigensians, published in the 1870s, took frequent liberties with the known facts in the name of mythologising the Cathars and denigrating the Church. Montségur became a kind of Camelot, full of wonders that were still awaiting discovery, and Peyrat was convinced that the Cathar Treasure was a cache of sacred texts hidden in caves at nearby Lombrives. Peyrat also wrote of a community of Cathars taking shelter in the caves after the fall of Montségur, who lived there until they were discovered by northern troops, who walled them up alive in the cave. Despite the high drama of this tragic story, there is no evidence that it ever happened. Like so much in Peyrat’s work, it is the product of imagination, rather than historical record. For Peyrat, the Cathars, in their anti-papal stance, were forerunners of Protestantism and also foreshadowed the French Republic.

  Peyrat’s mythologised, semi-fictional Cathars had a big impact on the likes of the Félibrige, a group of scholars which were keen to preserve works written in Occitan. Underneath this goal lay a separatist m
ovement, that wanted to restore Languedocian independence and identity. Peyrat was regarded as something of a guru, and the group began to produce its own Cathar theories, which tended to view the Cathars as occult initiates. The Cathar Treasure thus became a repository of ancient wisdom, with the Cathars being descended from the Druids, Hindus or Buddhists, while Montségur was interpreted as a solar temple. (Again, like Peyrat’s Cathars-in-a-cave story, this is pure fiction.)

  Déodat Roché (1877–1978), another southern self-styled Cathar expert, published a number of pro-Cathar works, including L’Église romane et les Cathares albigeois (1937) and Le Catharisme (1938). In 1948, he began publishing a magazine, Cahiers d’Études Cathares, and two years later, founded a group, the Société du Souvenir et des Études Cathares. During the 1930s, he headed a loose-knit group that included the novelist Maurice Magre (1877–1941) and the philosopher Simone Weil (1909–43), both of whom wrote pro-Cathar polemics. Magre famously referred to the Perfect as ‘the Buddhists of the West’, while Weil saw them – along with the Gnostics and the Manichaeans – as being one of the manifestations of the perennial philosophy; what was most needed, she felt, was a revival of Cathar spirituality and the simple lifestyles of the Perfect.

  A third figure who came into Roché’s orbit was the young German writer Otto Rahn (1904–39). In his first book, The Crusade Against the Grail (1933), Rahn interprets Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival as a thinly disguised account of the Albigensian Crusade. In Rahn’s reading of Wolfram, the Cathar Treasure is the Holy Grail itself, with Montségur as the Grail castle Munsalvaesche, and the martyred Raymond-Roger Trencavel as Parzival. In his next book, The Court of Lucifer (1937), Rahn compared the struggles of the Cathars against the Crusaders with those of Hitler to establish the Thousand Year Reich, seeing the Cathars as good Aryans who opposed not just Rome but also Judaism. It comes as no surprise to learn that, by this time, Rahn was working for Himmler, and writing what Himmler wanted to hear. Subsequently, myths have grown up around Rahn, depicting him as a German Indiana Jones who actually found the Grail and took it back to Germany, where it was hidden in the Bavarian Alps shortly before the end of the war. Other accounts of dubious provenance have the Nazi theorist Alfred Rosenberg flying over Montségur on 16 March 1944, the 700th anniversary of the citadel’s fall, as a mark of respect for the Good Christians, while Hitler himself was said to belong to a neo-Cathar group. With Otto Rahn, we see the Cathars claimed, not for Languedocian nationalism, but for the perverted Germanic myth-making of the Nazis.