*HEER, FRIEDRICH. The Medieval World: Europe, 1100–1350. Trans. Janet Sondheimer. New York: Penguin NAL, 1961. Still a great sweeping read.
Hérésis, no. 7, “Catharisme: L’Édifice imaginaire.” Carcassonne: Centre d’Etudes Cathares, 1998.
HETHERINGTON, PAUL. Medieval Rome: A Portrait of the City and Its Life. New York: St. Martin’s, 1994.
JOHNSON, PAUL. A History of Christianity. London: Penguin, 1988.
JOULIN, MARC. Petite Vie de saint Dominique. Paris: Desclee de Brouwer, 1989.
KELLY, J. N. D. The Oxford Dictionary of Popes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.
KRAUTHEIMER, RICHARD. Rome: Portrait of a City, 312–1308. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980.
LAMBERT, MALCOLM. Medieval Heresy: Popular Movements from the Gregorian Reform to the Reformation. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992.
*———. The Cathars. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. The latest scholarly tome on the Cathars. Special attention devoted to Catharism in Italy and the Autier revival. Authoritative, but for the stouthearted only.
*LE ROY LADURIE, EMMANUEL. Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error. Trans. Barbara Bray. New York: G. Braziller, 1978. A justifiably famous examination of Pyrenean peasants infected by Catharism.
MARROU, HENRI-IRÉNÉE. Les Troubadours. Paris: Seuil, 1971.
*MAURIN, KRYSTEL. Les Esclarmonde: La Femme et la féminité dans l’imaginaire du catharisme. Toulouse: Privat, 1995. Maurin, an academic with a lyrical writing style, delivers a fascinating work of cultural archaeology about the image of woman in the Cathar mythmaking of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In French. Exceptional.
MOORE, JOHN C., ed. Pope Innocent III and his World. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 1999.
*MOORE, R. I. The Formation of a Persecuting Society. New York: Black-well, 1987. A groundbreaking work in the study of heresy. Brief, crisp, and revolutionary in its assertions that Western civilization forged its institutions through persecution at the end of the twelfth and beginning of the thirteenth century. An important book, and not just for medievalists.
———. The Origins of European Dissent. Toronto: Medieval Academy of America Reprints, University of Toronto Press, 1994.
———, ed. The Birth of Popular Heresy. Toronto: Medieval Academy of America Reprints, University of Toronto Press, 1995.
MUNDY, J. H. Men and Women at Toulouse in the Age of the Cathars. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1990.
———. Society and Government at Toulouse in the Age of the Cathars. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1997.
NELLI, RENE. La Vie quotidienne des cathares en Languedoc au treizieme siecle. Paris: Hachette, 1975.
———. Les Cathares. Paris: Marabout, 1981.
NIRENBERG, DAVID. Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1996.
*OLDENBOURG, ZOE. Massacre at Montségur. Trans. Peter Green. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1997. Reedition of the impassioned 1959 work of popular history. Many of Oldenbourg’s conclusions have been superseded by subsequent research, but the book is still a stirring read. Oldenbourg’s greatest contribution remains the historical novel, of which she was a peerless practitioner in the 1940s and 1950s. In 1998 and 1999, three of her superb, atmospheric novels were reissued by Caroll and Graf, New York: The Cornerstone, Destiny of Fire, and The World Is Not Enough. The last, which bears no relation to 007, was described by the New York Times on its release as “the finest historical novel about the Middle Ages in this century, little short of a masterpiece.” Although it does not deal with the Cathars, the novel could be read by anyone seeking an imaginative escape into the Middle Ages.
PAGELS, ELAINE. The Gnostic Gospels. New York: Random House, 1979.
PALADILHE, DOMINIQUE. Simon de Montfort et le drame cathare. Paris: Perrin, 1988.
———. Les Grandes Heures cathares. Paris: Perrin, 1995.
PERNOUD, REGINE. Pour en finir avec le Moyen Age. Paris: Seuil, 1977.
PETERS, EDWARD. Inquisition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.
PILHES, RENE-VICTOR. Le Christi. Paris: Plon, 1998. N.
*RICHARDS, JEFFREY. Sex, Dissidence, and Damnation: Minority Groups in the Middle Ages. London: Routledge, 1991. Brief, lively, and scholarly, the study gives hair-raising details of the persecution of Jews, heretics, and lepers. Instructive but appalling.
ROQUEBERT, MICHEL. L’Epopée cathare. 5 vols.
Toulouse: Privat, 1970–89 (vols. 1–4); Paris: Perrin, 1998 (vol. 5).
———. Montségur, les cendres de la liberté. Toulouse: Privat, 1998.
———. Histoire des cathares: Hérésie, Croisade, Inquisition, du onzième au quatorzième siècles. Paris: Perrin, 1999.
*ROUQUETTE, YVES. Cathars. . Trans. Roger Depledge. Portet-sur-Garonne: Loubatières, 1998. One of the few recent French popularizers of Catharism to be translated. Title presumably meant to be read: “Cathars. Period”—as if this were the last word. Rouquette is provocative in claiming to be a Cathar, polemical whenever he turns to history, and downright chatty in his tour of Languedoc literary circles. For Catharophiles only.
RUNCIMAN, STEVEN. The Medieval Manichee. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
SAYERS, JANE. Innocent III: Leader of Europe, 1198–1216. Harlow, England: Longman, 1994.
SHIRLEY, JANET, trans. The Song of the Cathar Wars, A History of the Albigensian Crusade, by William of Tudela and an Anonymous Successor. Aldershot, England: Scolar Press, 1996.
SOUTHERN, R. W. Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages. New York: Penguin, 1970.
*STRAYER, JOSEPH R. The Albigensian Crusades. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992. Originally published in 1971, Strayer’s account remains the most readable scholarly examination of the crusade in English. The paperback edition has a splendid epilogue by Carol Lansing, which outlines recent trends in English-language Cathar historiography. If you wish to deepen your knowledge of the Cathars, start here.
SUMPTION, JONATHAN. The Albigensian Crusade. London: Faber and Faber, 1978.
THOUZELLIER, C., trans. Une Somme anti-cathare: Le Liber contra manicheos de Durand de Huesca. Louvain: Universite catholique, 1964.
———, trans. Livre des deux principes. Paris: Cerf, 1973.
VICAIRE, M. H. Histoire de saint Dominique. 2 vols. Paris: Cerf, 1982.
*WAKEFIELD, WALTER L. Heresy, Crusade, and Inquisition in Southern France, 1100–1250. New York: Allen and Unwin, 1974. A solid introduction to the beliefs and the misfortunes of the Cathars and the Waldensians.
WAKEFIELD, WALTER L., and AUSTIN P. EVANS, eds. Heresies of the High Middle Ages. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.
WOOD, CHARLES T. The Quest for Eternity: Manners and Morals in the Age of Chivalry. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1983.
*www.cathares.org. The best on the Web by far. Not at all flaky, like too many of its fellow Cathar sites. Thousands of pictures available, biographies, time lines, maps, interactive facilities, etc. Updated weekly. Much of it has been mirrored in English.
ZERNER-CHARDAVOINE, MONIQUE. La Croisade albigeoise. Paris: Gallimard, 1979.
Acknowledgments
It is customary in acknowledgments sections to start with the professional, then move to the personal. A new millennium is beginning—let’s get our priorities straight this time.
I owe a very large debt of gratitude to Jill Pearlman, who has helped me at every stage of this project, as a fellow writer, an editor, a companion, a cheerleader, a spouse, and, perhaps most important, a cosurvivor of living in the middle of the countryside with two young and alarmingly vocal daughters, one of whom decided to come into our rural world on a memorable winter’s night. Without Jill’s support and astonishing ability to do several things at once, I could not have summoned the monomania necessary to complete this book.
My warmest thanks go to our hosts in French Catalonia, Vl
adimir and Roselyne Djurovic, who were unfailingly kind to the aliens in their midst. Our neighbor Henri Fabresse put his tractor in the service of sanity by plowing the land behind our farmhouse for a vegetable garden that had blessedly nothing to do with flaming heretics. Let no one ever belittle Catalan hospitality or wisdom.
In Languedoc, Jean-Pierre Pétermann was invaluable for giving me Catharized guided tours of Carcassonne and Toulouse that conveniently ignored any irrelevancies built in the last 800 years. Jean-Pierre even managed to sneak me into an off-limits archaeological dig to view the alleged bones of Count Raymond VI.
In Rome, the American Academy made available its resources to a seeker of Innocent III. Eli Gottlieb and Danella Carter, my hosts at the academy and longtime pals from New York, were gracious and patient with my medieval garrulity. Eli risked his eyesight by reading the entire manuscript in E-mail format in time to beat a deadline. While not a Perfect, he’s close.
My thanks as well to my immediate family—my parents for their support, my brother Kevin (my companion at Albi) for his unstinting encouragement of projects past and present, and my brother Donal for faxes of obscure troubadour lore—and to the many people who have helped along the way. Foremost among them is the late Matt Cohen, a friend who gave me hope, laughter, and one big push. Others helped in ways that are too diverse to detail: Liz and Kevin Conlon, Sandy Whitelaw, George Haynal, Doris Pearlman, Audrey Thomas, Valerie Chassigneux, Jean-Jacques Bedu, Bruce Alderman, Henri Salvayre, Heidi Ellison, Ruth Marshall, Randall Koral, Dawn Michelle Baude, Susan Adams, Patrick Cox, Zia Jaffrey, Mitchell Feinberg, Edward Hernstadt, Helen Mercer, Mark Hunter, Scott Blair, Niels Stoltenborg, Robert Sarner, Charles F. MacDonald, and Yovanka Djurovic. I would also like to acknowledge the invisible presence of two uncles who have been looking over my shoulder: Fathers Elisha and Damien O’Shea. It is a great pity that this book comes too late for us to sit down over a glass of brandy and have a meandering conversation about the Albigensians.
Thanks are also in order to the courteous librarians of the new and quirky Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, who, against all odds, never once failed to find the books I was seeking.
Publisher Scott Mclntyre deserves my gratitude for once again making a leap of faith, as does publisher George Gibson, who, along with editor Jacqueline Johnson, trained a textual trebuchet on the weak spots of my exposed prose. Any errors or lapses left standing are the result of my obstinacy.
Lastly, a tip of my hat to the café owners, restaurateurs, tourist office employees, hotel keepers, booksellers, museum guards, bartenders, and nuns of Languedoc, all of whom seem to have well-developed theories on who the Cathars were.
Index
A
Abelard, Peter, 28
Ad extirpanda (papal bull), 229, 230
Agnes of Montpellier, 76
Aimery of Montréal, 63, 104, 111, 130–31
Al-Andalus, 132
Albi, 1–5, 7, 31, 52, 58, 64, 110, 183
inquisitors in, 196, 200, 205–6
Albigenses
see Cathars
Albigensian Crusade, 2, 4, 6–8, 10, 19, 90, 97, 218
end of, 187, 192
Innocent III announced end of, 137, 138–39
mass executions by fire, 116
protagonists in, 152–56
Alfons-Jordan, 47
Alice of Montmorency, 108, 127, 135, 162, 255
Almohad armies, 132–33
Alphonse of Poitiers, 207
Amaury, Arnold, ix, 6, 15, 58–60, 61, 66, 68–69, 73, 92, 131, 137, 152, 180, 183, 246
and conclave on Raymond of Toulouse, 125–26
conflict with Pedro of Aragon, 138–41
and crusade, 76–78, 81–82, 84–85, 87, 95, 100, 101, 115, 133
in crusades, 76–78, 133
death of, 176
excommunicated civic government of Toulouse, 117–18
excommunication of Simon de Montfort, 159
and Raymond’s effort at rehabilitation, 128
Amaury de Montfort, xi, 166, 169–70, 172, 177–78, 181, 225
Amiel de Perles, 237
Amiel, Peter, 183, 215, 219
Amiens, 181
Andalusia, 133, 134
Annibaldi, 35
Anthroposophy, 254
Anticlericalism, 51–52
Antioch Wood, 209, 210
Antipopes, 34
Applewhite, Marshall, 261
Aquinas, Thomas, 175
Aquitaine, 47, 181, 212
Aragon, 47, 49, 137, 138, 139–40, 181, 240–41
nobles from, 92, 142
Aragon and Barcelona, kingdom of, 10, 47
Aragonese, 144–45
Ariege, 258–59
Aries, 183
Arnald, William, 200, 201, 202, 204, 206, 208, 210, 227
Arnold of Brescia, 28, 34
Arnold of Villemur, 153
Asset forfeiture, 57
Autier, James, 237
Autier, Peter, ix, 15, 231–32, 233–34, 235, 236, 237, 238, 240, 242
Autier, William, 231–32, 237
Avignon, 182–83
Avignonet, 208–10, 211, 213, 215, 218, 226
B
Babas-cool, 258–59
Baigent, Michael, 260
Balearic Islands, 181
Barcelona, 47, 138, 181
Basil the Bogomil, 23
Basque nobility, 142, 144
Baudelaire, Charles, 254
Bayle, Pons, 237, 242
Bayle, Sibyl, 242, 246
Béarn, 134
Beaucaire, 158, 159, 164, 183
Becket, Thomas, 25, 38, 66, 70
Bélibaste, William, ix, 15, 239–46
Bélibastes (clan), 239–40
Beatrice of Béziers, 49
Benedict VIII, Pope, 230–31
Benedict of Termes, 63
Bernanos, Georges, 64
Bernard de Castanet, Bishop, 4, 5, 232–33
Bernard de Caux, 227–28
Bernard de St. Martin, 210
Bernard de Simorre, 59
Bernard of Clairvaux, ix, 29–30, 29f, 40, 42, 49, 63
Bernard of Tiron, 28
Bernard-Otto of Niort, 184
Bertrand of Saissac, 51, 77, 104
Béziers, 7, 17, 52, 53, 58, 62, 90, 92, 100, 109, 111, 117, 163, 169
attack on, 78–80, 81–87, 88, 221
massacre at, 83f, 85–87, 89, 105, 124, 183
revenge of, 99
sack of, 6, 14, 121
Bishops, 50, 58, 140, 170–72, 195
ferreting out heretics, 194
Biterrois, 78–79, 81, 84, 85, 90
Black Brotherhood, 123, 160–61
Blanche of Castile, xi, 185–86, 185f, 189, 190, 207
Blanche of Laurac, x, 43, 63, 131, 184
Blood money, 196
Bogomil faith, 23, 26
Borsier family, 192
Bouchard de Marly, xi, 105–6, 108, 127, 135
in battle of Muret, 144, 145–47
death of, 182
Bouffeurs du curé (priest eaters), 249
Bourg, 91–92, 96, 206
fall of, 99
Bourrel, Aude, 234
Bram (town), 106, 109, 111, 124
Breakspear, Nicholas, 28
Byzantine Empire, 23
Byzantium, 108, 119
C
Cabaret, 111, 170
castle of, 104–6
Cabrel, Francis, 247–48
Caetani (clan), 35
Canon law, 119, 120, 140
Capets, 47, 177, 180, 181, 185, 212
annexing Languedoc, 10
Carcassonne, 7, 18, 31, 49, 52, 58, 62, 79–80, 89f, 111, 117, 136, 141
Cathars in, 100, 173
in crusade, 88–103
debate at, 59
dungeon of, 208, 228, 233
genie unleashed at, 137
Inquisition interrogations in, 228
Inquisition registers, 233
&n
bsp; inquisitors in, 196, 205–6
pop exploitation of Catharism, 248
and royal crusade, 184, 186
siege of, 99–100, 105, 206–7
Simon de Montfort master of, 106, 110
Castellar, 92, 96, 97–99, 206
Castelnaudary, 135, 173
Castile, 132, 133
Catalans, 142, 144
Catalonia, 92, 137, 225, 240, 243
Catapults, 112–13, 114, 127, 165, 166, 217, 218
Cathala, Arnold, 200
Cathar castles, 258, 259
Cathar country, 247–64
Cathar International, 21, 239
Cathar leaders
poverty of, 61–62
Cathar treasure, 217, 255, 260–61
story of, 251–52
Cathar wars, anonymous chronicler of, 167–68
Catharism, 7–9, 14–15, 44, 56, 81, 208, 219, 226, 243
beliefs in, 10–13, 21–22, 24–26, 31
defenders of, in Albigensian Crusade, 90
destruction of, 190, 228, 230
Dominican order and, 60
documentary record, 14–15
havens for surplus women, 64
Italian, 229–30
in Languedoc, 17–31, 41, 126, 214
as mass phenomenon, 260
in our day, 15–16, 247–64
repression of, 179
resistance to Inquisition, 204–5
reversion to, 170
Toulouse, 45, 122, 134
women in, 12, 25–26, 41–44, 173
Cathars, 2, 7–16, 57, 137, 156, 180, 232–38
betrayed to Inquisition, 196, 222–25, 229, 234–35, 237–38, 246
The Perfect Heresy Page 28