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From very early times people had struggled with a theological problem. Assuming that there is only one God, and that He is all powerful and wholly good, where does Evil come from? An obvious response is to say that evil proves that there must be at least two Gods, and one of them must be bad. An idea like this which proposes two opposing principles in the world is said to be ‘dualistic’. The idea that there were two ‘Gods’ a good one and a bad one, was expounded by Zoroaster (c.12,000 BC) so ‘Zoroastrianism’ is such a religion. The idea that the material world is intrinsically evil was stated as early as 500 BC by the Buddha with the words ‘all life is suffering’. The Buddhist Heaven is ‘nothingness’. At about the time of Jesus ‘Gnostics’ made the acquisition of esoteric knowledge a feature of their theology. The main ingredients of the Cathar religion are, therefore, of great antiquity.

   Christianity, the second oldest of the three great monotheistic religions, was boosted by being adopted as the official religion of the Roman Empire which occurred in the reign of Constantine, around 330 AD. France became Christian as a result. One of the great early Christian church councils took place at Béziers in 356 AD. At about the same time, a Persian named Mani was also wrestling with the problem of evil. He agreed that it proved that a single God cannot be omnipotent. The word ‘Manicheanism’ came to represent all dualist theology. (It is as unjust as naming America after Amerigo Vespucci).

   By the 500s the Roman empire had split in half. The Eastern half remained Christian and Roman, and both church and state were ruled by the Eastern Roman, or ‘Byzantine’ emperor. In this eastern half attention was focussed on ‘the problem of evil’ and dualist, ‘Manichean’ ideas were debated. The Byzantine emperors disliked their religion being criticised, so Dualists were exiled to Bulgaria, where they were called ‘Bogomils’. The Bogomil church flourished, and some of its members sneaked back from Bulgaria to the Mediterranean coast at Antioch. The western half broke up into various ‘barbarian’ states ruled by kings. Most of the ‘barbarian’ states were Christian. Christians living in those states owed allegiance to their kings as subjects, but to the Bishop of Rome, the ‘Pope’, as Christians. Although nearly all the lords were Christians, they tended to regard Christian precepts as merely advisory. Thus ‘loving your neighbour’ had to coexist with ‘murdering your neighbour’. The Pope was reduced to asking that one day a week should be designated ‘murder-free’. He allowed lords to appoint their unsuitable relatives as bishops.

   Christians fighting Christians was a disgrace to western Christendom, and in 1095 the Pope had the idea of channelling the murdering into a good cause. He would call upon the murderous ‘knights’ to go on a murdering package tour called a ‘Crusade’, which would reduce the number of those embarrassingly frequent incidents when they fought and robbed each other and particularly each other’s peasants. If he could not yet hope to stop the violence of the knights, he could at least export it. Since the persons to be murdered were infidel Muslims, the murdering would be a plus when you finally came before St Peter at the Heavenly Gate. If you didn’t die you might well find yourself Lord of somewhere like Antioch as a result. The existence of a Crusade would also prove that the Pope could recruit and direct a large army, raising his prestige in an armed and dangerous world.

   The Crusaders spent time at Antioch in 1098. Many sincere Christians in the army were horrified to discover that their leaders were prepared to abandon the attack on Jerusalem (their official target) once they had acquired Muslim towns which they could profitably rule. It seems likely in their perplexity they met the Bogomils of Antioch, who gave them a convincing explanation of the evil they were witnessing. The Bogomils (or Cathars, for it is they) explained that the earth we know is not in the middle between Heaven and Hell, but is Hell itself. The Old Testament God was the Devil. By being good in this world, souls might escape back to Heaven, from which they had been kidnapped by the Devil. All the powers of this world, including the Catholic church and its Crusade, were therefore evil. This explained the wealth and corruption of many church leaders, their failure to address the problems of human life and the embarrassing course that the Crusade itself was taking.

   Dualist ideas appeared shortly after the crusade in north-eastern France, and we are entitled to infer a connection, since north-eastern France was where many of the crusaders (such as Godfrey of Boulogne) came from. It was at this point that the term ‘Cathar’ was applied to the dualists for the first time. Other Crusaders had come from the Midi in the entourage of the count of Toulouse. Those of them who were influenced by the Cathar point of view gave sanctuary in the Languedoc to Cathar refugees expelled from their homes in the north east of France.

   Cathar numbers grew rapidly. The more the Catholics enjoyed earthly wealth and power, the more effectively they recruited Cathars. Every fat, grasping, lecherous, violent bishop was a godsend to Cathar propaganda. It is not easy to say what positive appeal the Cathars had, since we hear about them almost exclusively from Catholic sources, and it would seem to have been difficult for Cathars to suggest any particular lifestyle, since all human life was corrupt. The Cathar ‘Perfect’ who had led a simple and blameless life and finally starved himself to death was regarded as having qualified himself to break out of the cycle of birth, sin, death and reincarnation. His disembodied soul would thereby re-enter the Heaven of the good God from which Adam and Eve had been kidnapped by the Bad God. Since not even the Cathars expected that every human would be able to escape at the first attempt, some interesting moral crevices opened up. If one had committed robbery, murdered someone or had sex once, the game was up, so there was no reason not to do it again, and again, and again…

   Whatever its appeal, by the 1190s Catharism was booming. In Languedoc the Cathars organised a whole parallel church, aided and abetted by local lords such as the Counts of Béziers and Toulouse. In 1198, in the last year of Richard the Lionheart’s reign, Innocent III became Pope. As well as trying to make the clergy more respectable, he decided to turn up the heat on the Cathars, whose critique of the Catholic Church was particularly painful. Apart from mentioning the 'fat, grasping, and lecherous bishops' they did not hesitate to point out, in addition, how difficult it was to reconcile crusading with the pacifist ideas of Jesus. (Innocent was a keen crusader). Several churchmen had written to him anxiously about the increasing number of Cathars, who had resisted the efforts even of great preachers such as St Bernard to convert them: when Innocent sent his own ‘legates’ to show the Cathars the error of their ways, they were attacked, and one was assassinated. In 1209 Pope Innocent declared a crusade against the Cathars, which is always called ‘the Albigensian Crusade’ because some high profile Cathars came from Albi.

   His call was answered by many northern French knights, and, led by Arnald Amaury, Innocent’s bloodthirsty representative, they set off down the Rhone for the foreign country that was the Midi. Arriving outside Beziers in 1209, they summoned the Catholics to give up the Cathars for punishment. The locals refused, but then negligently allowed the crusaders to enter through an open gate. The Crusaders got into the town, and then (it is implausibly suggested) paused in mid-pillage to consult their spiritual advisers how they could distinguish the Catholics from the Cathars in dishing out the punishment. ‘Kill them all. God will know his own!’ was the reply.

   Advancing to Carcassonne the crusaders found that their reputation had preceded them. The terrified peasants had flocked for safety into the fortified area which is now the ‘Cité’ but was then little more than a walled enclosure. Without adequate water the town surrendered in a week. The defending Lord Trencavel was tricked into captivity, imprisoned in his own dungeon and quickly died of dysentery.

   Most of the crusaders thought, not unreasonably, that taking Beziers and Carcassonne was a fair return for the 40 days which they had agreed to invest in the project, and went home. From the few eccentric diehards who chose to stay on Simon de Montfort was elected leader. Simon led his men around the area, laying into the Cathars. In Bram a hundred Cathars had their noses, ears and lips cut off and ninety-nine had their eyes gouged out. The last was left with one eye to lead the others back to a neighbouring Cathar castle (Lastours) as a warning. (This juicy item is unaccountably omitted from Canon J-P Andrieu’s 1910 History of Bram). At Minerve the first mass burning of Cathars occurred. A local story asserts that the Cathars exchanged rude remarks about their captors on the way to the fire by inserting them into an Occitan song which the northerners could not understand.

   The Count of Toulouse perceived the ‘Crusade’ as a routine invasion, and fought back. His cousin the King of Aragon came over the Pyrenees to help, but the two of them were defeated by Simon at Muret in 1213. Then there was some relief when a siege engine, manned, oxymoronically, by women on the walls of Toulouse, scored a direct hit on Simon de Montfort’s head. Deprived of its moving spirit the Crusade petered out, and the remaining French knights staggered homewards with their loot, or stayed on, if they were lucky, to occupy castles in the Midi whose Cathar lords were dead.

   King Philip Augustus of France had been consulted about the Crusade and had not objected, though he was too busy to take part. He had his work cut out defending the small area round Paris (which was in practice all his ‘kingdom’ amounted to) from the English and the Germans. After Simon’s death in 1218 Philip sent his son Louis to carry on the work. He carried out a horrendous massacre at Marmande and then went home.

   A large number of Cathars now came out of hiding, and several of those who had made tactical conversions to save their skins and castles reconverted. There was even a Conference in 1224 at Pieusse, near Limoux, at which a hundred Cathars discussed the boundaries of their various dioceses. But their optimism was premature. Although Philip Augustus’ grandson (Saint) Louis IX was still young, the ‘Royal Crusade’ continued under professional leadership. These soldiers came to finish the job, rather than just fulfil the crusader vow of forty days’ service. By 1229 the Count of Toulouse, a major defender of the Cathars, was defeated.

   The final stages of the affair were at hand. To finish off the Cathars the church established the ‘Inquisition’, whose members were often members of the new ‘Dominican’ order. This was not popular and resulted in an ambush at Avignonet in 1242 in which several inquisitors were murdered by Cathar sympathisers.

   This provided the excuse for the French King Louis IX, now of age, to invade the Midi and finish the job. In 1243 the last concentration of Cathars was besieged in Montségur, near Lavelanet, and in the following year this Cathar ‘Eagle’s Nest’ was captured. Two hundred Cathar ‘perfects’ emerged to walk freely on to a great bonfire where they were burned to death. Without castles the Cathars were reduced to moving about in secret, mingling with the people they served and crossing the Pyrenees with shepherds moving their sheep to pasture.

   The last community of Cathars was at Montaillou on the remote Plaine de Sault west of Quillan. The Inquisition fell on the villagers in 1309 and cross-questioned them, exposing Cathar sympathisers and burning the worst offenders. After Montaillou there remained only individuals, but these, too, were hunted down. In 1321 Guilhem Belibaste, the last known ‘perfect’, was tricked by an inquisition secret agent, and burned to death.

   Catharism was now extinct in France, but persecution continued in Italy, Spain and the Balkans. It was effectively eliminated by the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans in the 1460s, though Bogomils were said to have remained in the Balkans until as late as 1850. The king refortified many ‘Cathar’ castles for defence against the Spanish. It is important to remember this when you see their ruins. You are invariably looking at the ruins of what the king built, and not what the Cathars’ patrons built. (The Cathars did not build castles for themselves because they were pacifists.) Fortunately nothing human can change the terrain on which they stand, which makes them worth the visit anyway. At Carcassonne the king removed the population from the ‘Cité’, rebuilt it (roughly) as we see it today, and constructed a new trading ‘Bastide’ on the opposite side of the river, where it still forms the centre of modern Carcassonne. The ‘Cité’ was saved from demolition in the nineteenth century by historically aware individuals like Viollet le Duc who thus began the modern ‘heritage’ movement.

   The conquest of the Midi by ‘France’ was permanent. Out of sight was out of mind, and Parisian governments often neglected the Midi. Ironically, the Cathars now play a role in the economic recovery of the area by attracting tourists in large numbers. Europe, united beyond the wildest dreams of Pope Innocent III, contributes to this by grants. But some loose ends remain. The night before the fall of Montsegur, four Cathars were sent out to rescue the ‘Cathar treasure’. Whatever happened to them? Was the Cathar treasure hoard just Cathar, or was it Visigothic as well? Did the Visigothic treasure hoard include items brought by Jesus escaping to France rather than ascending to Heaven? Had the Knights Templar discovered the treasures of King Solomon’s Temple and added this to the hoard as well? Is the ‘treasure’ esoteric knowledge rather than heaps of gold? Is any of it still there?

   Few today believe in Cathar cosmology or theology: count how many celibate pacifist suicidal vegetarians you know! Nevertheless, the perennial appeal of the struggle of the Little Good Guys against the Big Bad Guys still moves thousands of unfit tourists to climb up ‘Cathar Castles’ none of which were built by Cathars, hardly any of which were ever occupied by them and all of which represent a completely anti-Cathar philosophy. But whenever you weep at might conquering right, ‘Vous êtes en pays Cathare’.