Catharism Pyrenean
Michel Begon March 1995
Summary: A legend aside, the Pyrenees and Cathar War Albigensian could well be just a phase, especially bloody, conversion of European land economics to monetary economics, traditional Catholicism on the basis of feudal rural land rent, but the Cathar Christianity, more mercantile and urban addressing the foundation of the clergy themselves.
Former cons modern
The Albigensian Crusade, the fall of Montsegur and the extermination of the Cathars still arouse bitter controversy. Romanticism Occitan sees the climax and the death of the civilization of Languedoc, one of the troubadours and Clemence Isaure. Some historians praise instead of having the Inquisition rooted out heresy in the Holocaust, by inventing a "final solution" that has continued until today, to be repeated. But the historical school of Annales, including Emmanuel Leroy-Ladurie, have placed this war of religions field very material struggles between two economic systems, say in broad strokes: Land cons mercantile, where every legend vanished, particularly the very or too famous myth of the Holy Grail.
Efforts to resume contributions by historians in the wider perspective, combining all possible points of view, population law and economics, and mapping data Pyrenean territories that today make up the departments of Ariege, Haute-Garonne and the Aude.
What remains true to the legend, is that in Roman times the south of Europe, between Barcelona and Istanbul, was more developed economically and culturally more civilized than its northern part, and that he followed, not without jealousy and cruelty, the hostility of the laggards. We measure today within Islam the same as before cleavages within Christianity, between the fiercely fundamentalist to modernist. Indeed, recall that by the year 1200, the French unit did not exist, and competed in the kingdom, on the one hand, and feudal agricultural plains of northern Paris is still there a large village, half-rural where the king had only occasionally, on the other hand, the economy already close monetary and industrial noon Pyrenees, with already large market towns such as Toulouse, whose walls were seven kilometers in circumference, or Cahors, first banking center at the time. But in this 13th century feudalism prevailed on rural market towns, and the clerical interpretation of the Gospels in their symbolic interpretation.
A theology purified
In general, we start the outline of the Cathars by long theological developments, difficult to follow in their subtlety. Tranchon ahead net. All religions admit a double interpretation, as they are aimed at the rural illiterates who want to see the divinity in appearance and feel by the relics, or of urban residents, even the homeless, who can read and write, which claim live their personal faith through direct access to the Scriptures, stripped of all materialism.
The Cathars (from the Greek "cathairos" pure) was a spiritualist version, elitist and aniconic (no holy image) of Christianity came from Constantinople to Milan, Avignon, Toulouse or Barcelona, via, thinks we, the current Bogomil Bosnia. It is even believed that the former Bosnian Cathars in the 16th century have converted to Islam, another religion aniconic, not without talking about them today by their opposition to the Serbian Orthodox peasants.
In this light, the specific theological and sacramental Cathar perfect fit in a logical and somewhat obsessive:
accordance with the neo-Platonic faith, God and the principle Welfare are purely spiritual, immaterial, invisible and impalpable, conversely, material things, deemed unclean, belong to the principle of Evil ("Deus non fecit visibilia" God did not create the visible entities). This is a classic dualism in the Byzantine tradition of the Gnosis.
therefore, Christ could be incarnated in a mortal body, and has lived among men in appearance. This is the fundamental dogma of Monophysites Alexandria.
therefore also Christian baptism can not be administered through water, unclean thing, but by the laying on of hands, as if an invisible fluid passed from Parfait faithful. This sacrament, called "consolamentum", required such a purity of "consolation" act than it was hardly the point of death.
religious buildings are excluded from the precious objects, relics and icons.
full ownership of buildings and all income from real rights are denied to priests who rely on donations and money from quests faithful. This entails disqualification from the lifting of rent, including tithes.
the Cathar clergy is reduced to a few dignitaries: bishops, deacons and good men, otherwise ill-defined, and deprived of resources. It seems that these priests are homeless, being attached to any hardware territory.
This doctrine has sometimes been denied that the Cathar church was Christian. But recent research show that the Cathars practiced the Bible, Old Testament understood, however, with a predilection for the Gospel of John and the epistles of Paul, specifically designed to the attention of city dwellers. Besides the Catholic Church to combat heresy, had she not prohibit individuals from holding the Bible, except the Psalter, the breviary and hours, provided they were in Latin?
"It seems certain that Montaillou Catharism is experienced by those who have adopted it as an extreme variant of Christianity and heroic, and not as a non-Christian religion. To be honest The Cathars of Montaillou against the natives, is simply true Christianity. " (Emmanuel Leroy-Ladurie: Montaillou Occitan village from 1294 to 1324).
The rent and profit merchant
To explain, if possible, differences in attitudes reflected in the religious war, we introduce a simple idea to that competed in the 13th century and even compete until the 20th century:
one hand, a land economy, giving rise to the local levy of land rent in kind by the privileged orders on the peasantry, under various forms of ecclesiastical tithes, feudal rights and stately, tolls, fees mundane of land rents, fines, legal and tax regal;
other hand, a market economy, including offshore flows of goods, which runs a profit money for the benefit of merchants, bankers, manufacturers, craftsmen or even mobile workers.
Both behaviors are transposed in the economic performances of faith. Medieval Catholicism condemns the manipulators of money, accused of usury, and the revered incarnation of the deity in the products of agriculture. Wheat and wine, forming the main base of tithing (Latin for "decima pars": the tenth part, ie 10% of the crop) are really in the Eucharist the flesh and blood of Christ, not their arbitrary symbols, such as the Cathars believe (and, later, the reformers). Moreover, Catholicism does he worships the Earth and not the holy places, to preach the crusade in the Holy Land? Instead, the Cathars seem to idealize these "invisibles" such as capital flows or accounting counterparts. Since the 13th century, the south Occitan, Catalan or Italian practiced credit money, the letter exchange or lending at interest, around the textile industry which formed the axis of the market.
But it is simplistic to believe that between these two economic systems was returning a class struggle. Feudal lords, because they dictating both peasant and urban populations, had an ambiguous attitude, even doubles while proclaiming themselves good Catholics, he covertly favored heresy. They took advantage of the conflict to appropriate the land of the clergy, as will the Protestant nobility in the 16th century.
Population pressure
Let us stick to the basics. The long domination of medieval land rent, which historians call the "old economic regime," was based on the rule of the ecclesiastical property of the soil and the real rights of feudalism, but chanted an oscillatory movement, linked recurrent periods of forfeiture, secularization, or nationalization of church property by lay authorities. There are four major episodes of dispossession of the clergy, coinciding with population increases, the 8th century by Pepin the Short, and because of heresies of the 13th century, then the Reformation of the 16th century, and finally by the liberal revolutions of the 18-19th centuries, which gave precedence to the annuity market and created the "new economic regime."
This oscillatory motion may have been, in Occitan, wider and therefore more brutal than elsewhere. This was the 9th century depopulation of the Pyrenean area, opened its colonization huge vacant spaces to the monks who settled along the string of their convents in forest edge Plantaurel by appropriating them to soil and property rights relating thereto. From east to west, succeeded the great abbeys of Fontfroide Lagrasse, Saint Hilaire, Boulbonne, Lézat the Salenques, Mas d'Azil Combelongue or Holy Cross.
However, the large population increase of 11-13th centuries, causing scarcity and soon the scarcity of good land, did only add the weight of ecclesiastical rents, for the game only offers a rare and a massive demand, and thus inflame the claims or liens against the greed of the Church. The latter, feeling threatened in his temporal interests, made his defense by moral group of the most powerful ecclesiastical owners of the time, the monastic order of Cistercians or Cistercians, who have branched out throughout the West. The Cistercians were wont to set up their convent schools in the most remote deserts and argue against the moneylenders and intellectuals, which made them unsuspected of convenience for the modern to urban concentration or the cash economy. The spokesman of the traditional order was Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (Cistercian abbey daughter), the great opponent of the philosopher Abelard.
The defensive strategy of the Church was could not be more simple: first divert the eager youth, particularly chivalry, to distant and murderous crusades, then ideologically counter the bourgeoisie, especially financial, industrial cities. As the South of Europe was more advanced than the north, this one would be the basis for the reconquest of souls. We can reconstruct this strategy by bringing together contemporary events than the usual monographs only too likely to sever the point of making them unintelligible.
The era of the Crusades coincides with population growth, itself partly due to the "little optimum climate "of the time. Beginning in 1098, it ends in 1291 with the fall of the Latin Empire of the East. Now, St. Bernard, who preached the Second Crusade in Vezelay, also came in 1148 in the fight Lauragais Catharism. In 1204, the Fourth Crusade, however, seized the most Christian Constantinople, the Byzantine Empire and shared between the Frankish barons. This precedent had to please, it is repeated. In 1208, the murder of the papal legate, the Cistercian Pierre de Castelnau, gave the Pope Innocent III proclaimed during the crusade against Raymond VI of Toulouse, his vassals and subjects, "for," said the legate, "violated Peace Lent and feast days, for having entrusted the Jews from public office and abbeys persecuted, stripped of his possessions Bishop of Carpentras, finally, because it protects the heretics. "However, the crusade against the Moors Spain rivaled that of the Albigenses, especially since in 1212 the victory of Las Navas de Tolosa, which was won by King Peter of Aragon, also suspected of Cathar opened Andalusia to the Cistercian order (Calatrava particular) and the chivalry.
The rise of the bourgeoisie
more dangerous for the Church, the bourgeoisie of the cities to the growing population, and become almost industrial, Tuscany, Lombardy, Lyonnais, Catalonia and Languedoc did not pretend to crusades, but business. She attacked the Church hierarchy that made him the dam, by attacking their weak points in the eyes of the humble, the monopoly of ground rent, the dissipation of its extravagant rents, the incomprehensibility of his sermons in Latin. Demagoguery or not, she advocated the moral purity and deprivation, proposed to abolish the clerical hierarchy and seize his property in the public interest, recommended free access to all the faithful to the Bible.
the 12th century, a wealthy merchant from Lyon, Pierre de Vaux or Valdo, abandoned his possessions to the poor and preached poverty itself, by founding the Christian sect of the Waldenses (who gave his name to the Swiss canton of Vaud). They spread into northern Italy and the south French, criticizing the clergy and its immense wealth claiming the translation of the Scriptures in the vernacular. Persecuted, they took refuge in the Alpine valleys, where they remain after rallying the Protestant Reformation, and in the Pyrenees, especially Ariege countries, where around 1200 they were more numerous than the Cathars, with which they are often confused, but wrongly. It is even believed that at that time was mostly Pamiers Vaud. But perhaps it was valdismo faith too popular to win the Toulouse bourgeoisie?
The Cathar religion was contrary to the elitist qu'adoptèrent Occitan number of nobles and especially the great middle class, primarily those of "sheriffs" of Toulouse, who was conscientious and arm for the Languedoc. This city had aristocracy but admiration for Constantinople, then the largest city of Christendom and the most industrious, she borrowed canons and doctrines learned. Opposing the Northern style, fashionable flowers of the field, and that the Italians called "Gothic" with contempt, the Romanesque of the south including the Pyrenees and was inspired by the Coptic Orthodox basilicas. Imported from Byzantium, Catharism triumphed in the city sheets of northern Italy, where it has long his strongest support, and in the maritime kingdom of Aragon, while in 1167 the Patriarch of Constantinople presided Nicetas the Cathar council Saint Felix de Caraman at Lauragais.
Radicals in their way, the Cathars abolished the ecclesiastical hierarchy and, consequently, the land of the clergy. They forbid their priests, called the "good men" or "beards" (because they wore beards fashionable Byzantine), not perfect, as we say today, to live rents or sacraments. These were often of poor weavers who lived by their own work, so much so that 13th century the name of "weaver" or "Tissandier" was synonymous with Cathar.
"The profession is exercised to tailor Montaillou as the perfect pitches: good Cathars, they earn their living and their sky mending tunics or manufacturer of the gloves. "(Emmanuel Leroy-Ladurie, Montaillou village occitan).
course, tithes were deleted or disputed, although historical documents are too rare to measure the phenomenon. But every time we stood strong in his works, the Church was able to respond effectively by a reform-cons spiritual.
Long before the Councils of Trent and Vatican, the Church formed the plan to fight the enemy with his own ideological weapons, purity and poverty, and in the heart of its social base, the cities themselves. If they were austere, the Cistercians became too rural for this purpose. The parade was to create "the mendicant orders", Franciscans and Dominicans, Carmelites and Capuchins, who also were recruited in urban areas, did vow of purity and poverty and gave up the land rent to live only for donations money.
In Tuscany, the life of Francis of Assisi began like Peter Waldo, the son of a wealthy merchant gave up the goods of this world to preach the Gospel poverty, but she concludes otherwise, because, having thought the order, and notifying each contest of the people he led, in 1223 the church approved its Order of Friars Minor, also called the Cordeliers, and canonized him as he died. Similarly, the Church in 1215 authorized the Order of Friars Preachers, also known as Dominicans or Jacobins, founded by Saint Dominic in Languedoc.
The mission of the mendicant orders was to allay the Cathar heresy, both in Italy and in Occitan, by recapturing through preaching and example minds of the bourgeois, craftsmen and workers. Unlike the Cistercians, they n'implantaient more in their convents deserts wild, but in the heart of major cities. Circumstances help, they reached their goals.
The creation of the Inquisition
Because it binds directly to the Cathar Pyrenees, we must insist on the apostolic mission of Brother Dominic in Languedoc.
At the dawn of the 13th century, the prevailing situation of the Church was not just threatened, although there were little peasants attracted by heresies. Storefront in Toulouse or Pamiers, or were mere peddlers, merchants adhere to the Cathar faith. The nobility of the county of Foix, forced to reckon with the Benedictine abbeys, primarily Boulbonne, and share with the bishops Pariatge (combination of two lords) of cities, was eager to usurp the church property and tithes . Among the pro-Cathar lords, there were around 1200, the Mirepoix, the Durban, Château-Verdun and especially Earl Raymond-Roger of Foix, whose wife Philippa ran to a house in Dun Perfect. Of the two sisters of the count, Esclarmonde had received the "consolamentum" to Fanjeaux Cecile was Vaud.
The Cistercian spiritual failure is manifest, two prelates from Spain, to return from Rome in 1206, Bishop Diego of Osma and Dominic de Guzman, they lavished the board to "teach to the example of the Divine Master in humility , to walk without ostentatious paraphernalia, no money, like the apostles and of course like the "good men". Fee For example, Diego and Dominic preached in Montpellier, then in Montreal and Fanjeaux in 1206-07. It is on a ridge of the Corbières, near Mirepoix, took place the miracle of fire, we often see represented in the churches of Italy building Cathar local cast immediately at stake, books Cathars consumed him, but the writings of Dominica were projected height. It is also that it Prouille founded his first community of nuns.
In 1207, a famous colloquy was held at Castella Pamiers, under the arbitration of Arnaud de Crampagna. The city was mostly Vaud, so Diego and Dominic, assisted by Navarre, Bishop of Saint Lizier in Couserans, there had to fight two heresies at once. The arguments exchanged we were not preserved. But we know that Esclarmonde Foix, who was speaking of the perfect all his enthusiasm, Etienne de Mercy launched this apostrophe contemptuous: "Lady, go and spin your distaff, it is not for you to speak in a meeting like this!" . Dominique was not a success, so its perceived this threat: "Where does the blessing is, worth the stick."
Toulouse taken, in 1215 he founded his Order of Preachers. In 1223, two years after his death, Pope Gregory IX was unloading the bishops of the mission to hunt down heresy, and confided to the Dominicans for Languedoc and Provence to the Franciscans.
Pamiers was framed by the convents of the mendicant orders all at once and, even today, the tower of the Cordeliers to perpetuate the memory of the crusade.
Crimson Gold
called Albigensian crusade began in 1209 under the command of spiritual Arnaud Amaury, Abbot of Citeaux, and under the military command of Simon de Montfort (now Montfort l'Amaury en Yvelines), by the sack of Béziers tragic, and the famous exhortation: "Kill them all, let God hers. "However, could it be argued that it was a religious war, pitting the faithful of other believers, or a national war against French Occitan? Nothing could be proved and an examination of the facts even suggests the opposite.
A real war of religions would like both sides of religionists believe, as the 16th century. It is not. Apart from the "good men" whose priesthood is declared, the protagonists of religious opinion known is equivocal, indecisive, or at least swinging. Historians devote pages to wonder what was the confession of successive counts Toulouse or Foix, and their vassals, without ever reaching a conclusion one way or the other, so their protestations of loyalty to the Church coexisted with the favors and protections afforded to heretics. In any event, the real Cathars have never faced a narrow elite, but the decisive influence, because the more educated. As for the so-called crusaders, greed, loot, the ransom, looting or sadistic pleasure was more active on them that the faith of Christ. Moreover, the two sides stipendiary mercenaries or the road to die instead of sponsors.
Simon de Montfort thought to be a personal principality of the Languedoc, paying his fellow knights and road companies with money bankers Cahors, he had to repay, with interest , by the oozing golden skin all together Languedoc, Cathars, Waldensians, Jews and Catholics together. Its strategic goal was to succeed the Count of Toulouse, to seize the lordship of Pamiers and replace all the vassals of Raymond VI by his own vassals from France and eager fiefdoms. Its failure was militarily and politically. Despite the strength of French chivalry, he stumbled the tenacious resistance of Foix, immediately established a "sanctuary" behind the walls of the Cathar Plantaurel limestone, the Ariege notched just not at the bar (at Vernajoul). Although the bishops have done so appointed Count of Toulouse, he met both the moral resistance of Toulouse, disciplined behind their Capitouls.
By September 1209, barely Beziers and Carcassonne were being taken and murdered, Simon de Montfort marched on the Ariege, the call of the Bishop of Pamiers. The Crusaders n'eurent victory on the foothills. Marshal Guy de Lévis Mirepoix removed and received a fief. Pamiers to Bélesta Lavelanet and it will become Earth's Marshal, and the Dukes of Levis-Mirepoix will until we flamboyant title of "Marshal of the Faith." The Bishop of Pamiers Simon opened his city and substituted the Count of Foix in the Pariatge. The Crusaders also captured and burned Saverdun Foix, but may not reach the castle or in advance Sabarthes. Montfort also ravage Lizier Saint Girons and Saint, though the Cathars were rare Couserans, but to punish the Vicomte de Comminges to lend a hand to Raymond VI. Anxious to legitimize and perpetuate his conquest, he issued the same Articles of Pamiers, 1 December 1212, transposing into the Languedoc feudal custom of Ile de France, restoring the ecclesiastical tithes and other dues, forcing parishioners to attend Mass or face a fine, imposing everyone to seize the heretics ... Yet he was struggling before the Pyrenean foothills, while Toulouse, taking refuge at Montsegur, made it the citadel of the Cathar faith. We pledge that free people loggers, shepherds, miners and blacksmiths was much more rebellious against the grain crossed the plains or Terrefort! The obstacle remained impassable, since 1228 again, Guy de Montfort was slain by an arrow in Varilhes headquarters and the army remained blocked at Royal St Jean de Verges, powerless to force the pace of La Barre.
Scarcely had he proclaimed Count of Toulouse that before his exactions, while the Languedoc rose against Simon de Montfort, who was killed by a bullet in the second siege of Toulouse, in 1218. The Crusaders disbanded guns were compelled to flee their strongholds in the north, barely won, soon turned against them. We can not yet speak of a national uprising. The horrors of a savage war solidarity had been a moment of cities and regions that do not speak the same dialect of Occitan, facing the cruel lords of the north. Then the Languedoc pronounced for the new king of France, Louis IX, whom they expected that peace instaurât Royal, as well as its field Ile. The young Count Raymond VII could then qu'abdiquer its rights under the Treaty of Meaux in 1229, making her heir to the king's brother, Alphonse, or failing that the king himself. Count Roger IV of Foix rallied so quickly to St. Louis that directly lent him the tribute, which enshrined the separation of the County of Foix with Languedoc for a very long period until 1789.
The crown was careful to uphold the rights of lords and enforce Occitan dialects Oc by its directors, so that Languedoc was attached to the main Capetian and Valois support during the Hundred Years War against the English.
Repression terrorist Languedoc
The barons of the first Albigensian Crusade (1209 - 1218) fought a war of all against raids and did exclude by force. The royal crusade, which was later (1226 - 1229), divide and conquer and succeeded. She focused her blows on the bourgeoisie Cathar and Jewish Toulouse and cities to cut the feudal aristocracy. If you understand the royal policy, it was gang up the clergy, the feudal lords and officials, all beneficiaries of land rents, against the money men, suspected of having made a pact with Satan, the defense faith for an excuse to rob and ruin the premise of a cash economy.
measures then taken on behalf of St. Louis are not we talk without taboos thrown in a very close and very painful past, against "plutocracy." By the Treaty of Meaux, Count Toulouse forced herself to return all property to the church, pay tithes now and pay compensation to the Cistercian abbeys and Clairvaux. It also decided to exclude the Cathars public office and ordered that if they converted, they dealt a double cross on the chest in yellow. Catholics even had a moral obligation to denounce heretics by the Inquisition. The sentences were the stake or the "wall", ie putting in irons with fasting on bread and water, often to death, but exile, the obligation to pilgrimage or just fines. The royal officials perceived property confiscated from prisoners, called "outstanding" and were not performed because of worsening in their favor the convictions of the Inquisitors. Meanwhile, the Jews were forbidden to lend at high interest, to exercise public office, to have Christian servants, and their duty was served to wear the yellow badge on their clothes and to pay their parish (Catholic) 6 Money by fire each year.
Such premiums repression or abjuration were soon put to thank you the citizens, who could not hide, being the most prominent. Terrorism Moral offered to spectacle: the same day of 1234 when Toulouse celebrated the canonization of St. Dominic, an elderly woman was publicly burned heretical (source: Journal of Fanjeaux). In 1320, the Shepherds' Crusade, which came up Lézat, was even during extensive anti-Jewish pogroms. Those who fled were not converted, the rich Cathar to Italy, Milan, Cremona, the Jews of Europe to the east. It was then that the citadel of Montsegur, it was a refuge for outlaws, became the spiritual capital of the dualistic faith, thanks to the emigration of citizens to pog Pyrenees Toulouse - some something similar to what would later be reformed Geneva for the bourgeoisie and persecution of Lyon.
Taking Montsegur in 1244 was the implementation of the strategy division, which was said skill. The bishops of Narbonne and Albi and the seneschal of Carcassonne in the besieged fortress with machines and catapults. Perfect for the spiritual leader had Bernard Marti, and Pierre-Roger de Mirepoix command instead. Perhaps operations would they failed, if the peasants of the village in the night of 1 to 2 March 1244, the Crusaders had opened the path of the goats of the north face, the least accessible and least defended. The Knights had survived. The Perfect number of 225 were delivered to the pyres Prat dels Cramats. The castle was given to Guy de Levis, whose descendants held it until the 16th century garrison.
obsession repressive Foix
However, as has happened to the Reformation in the 17th century, persecution, torture, exile or renunciations forced the feudal and bourgeois Catharism transformed into a popular religion, but illegal. Resentment against the clergy and the French partners in the same hatred, multiplied conversions in occupations remunerated silver artisans, woodworkers, workers wandering peddlers, more rarely among the peasants. Secret networks are knotted. The Perfect hid in huts and shaved their beards. The climax of the Cathar ariégeois was therefore not earlier, but subsequent to the fall of Montsegur, not without giving a headache to the Inquisition Pamiers until 1330.
It seems that the "sanctuary" fuxéen has persisted south of the pitch of the Bar, in association with the forest economy, pastoral and mining in the Pyrenees, or even through the protection of Catalonia, the Cathar faith being less repressed. Already in 1213, King of Aragon Cathar came up to fight the Crusade Muret, also without success. When in 1272 Philip the Bold tried to take the county of Foix, King of Aragon came up again in Pamiers to dissuade. A notary Ax (les-Thermes), Pierre Authier, had he not conveniently "proved" that from time immemorial the seat of Sabarthes fell under Aragonese movement? However, this same Pierre Authier, assisted by his brother William and several imitators, preached in the valley of the Ariege renewal of the Cathar faith, after a trip to Lombardy, and gave him, in 1300, a chandelier she had never known.
The reaction of the Inquisition was so strong that it Pamiers encouraged informers everywhere, ordered the seizure of many shepherds and even stop the entire village of Montaillou the Sault plateau, leading to spectacular convictions at the stake or wall. It is perhaps not irrelevant to note that the roundup of an entire village in 1308, just before the worst royal action against the manipulators of money, namely the first banishment of Jews from France 1310 and the destruction of the Knights Templar in 1312. Such facts seem to indicate a willingness to demonize the creation, loans and currency speculation, for the benefit of the land rent. For the county of Foix, the new repression of heresy introduced a cons-offensive of the tithe.
The Grand Inquisitor Pamiers was from Saverdun. First professed to Cistercian Abbey Boulbonne, then a student at the University of Paris, then abbot of Fontfroide Pierre Fournier was elevated to the bishopric of Pamiers in 1317 and to the bishopric Mirepoix in 1326 and finally he became pope in 1334 under the name of Benedict XII reigned in Avignon. Being very proud of "cruel and relentless soft" (Leroy-Ladurie) he began to persecute the people of Ariege, the prelate took with him the manuscripts of the clerks, recording into Latin careful questioning he presided and at his death were archived libraries Vatican. We found them to be read with amazement that the future pope had the art to say the most unlikely packages, such as the commanders of the Languedoc had leprosy conspirators with the king of Granada and the Sudan to Babylon (sic) to poison the sources and Well, starting with those of Pamiers (Jean Duvernoy: Inquisition Pamiers, 1986). To our best knowledge of the Cathars, there also discovered the copy of the procedures initiated against the inhabitants of Montaillou, including Emmanuel Leroy-Ladurie fired in 1975, his great work of ethnography and medieval Pyrenees: Montaillou Occitan village from 1294 to 1324 .
It also learned the underlying reasons for the persistence Inquisition, which were to bring tithes on grain from the tenth to eighth in the country of Foix, to extend the turnips and the pulses, which previously did resent, and especially cattle with all meat products (the "carnalages). Such abuses were not without arousing the disapproval and popular anticlericalism, such as one sees in the deposition of a schoolmaster Pamiers Priory Saverdun cons a shoemaker and a haberdasher from Unac who have dared to whisper:
"Clerics should be expelled and if they could agree with the Count of Foix, they would do well to ensure that no clerk never ascend beyond the pitch of the bar."
For these seditious, the shoemaker Pierre Guilhem was sentenced to the "wall" 13 January 1329.
The end of an era and the birth of a myth
Catharism Pyrenean nearly disappeared in those years with the torment of the last known Perfect: William Belibaste born Cubières (Aude), long comb maker Weaver in Lleida in 1321 and burned the castle Villerouge-Termenès. This disappearance, abuse of the Inquisition were perhaps not the only cause, but also the decline of Constantinople, the excessive demands of faith and dualistic, In any case, the demographic collapse between 1320 and the Great Plague of 1348. From that moment, the creation of walled towns in Languedoc paused and depopulation, about half, attenuated the scarcity of land at the same time it removed the excess of men, degrading the land rents and bouncing pay wages to an unprecedented level. Wage inflation and price depreciated fixed annuities even money. Depletion of owners and annuitants with the ease of artisans and laborers found could weaken the moral value of purity and poverty.
Catharism was not followed, unlike the valdismo, which was maintained by joining the Protestant Reformation. If there are obvious similarities between the Albigensian Crusade and the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries, is that the same causes in the same conditions cause the same effects:
"In the lengthy history of heresies Occitan, the thirteenth in the seventeenth century, the conflict of tithes is underlying, recurring, and it runs like a thread through the challenges farmers and it is, the Cathar Calvinism, a common denominator, more obvious than is the continuity dogmatic, often absent. "(E. Leroy Ladurie, op cit).
So why conflict as down-to-earth he has summarized in collective memory of the myth of the Holy Grail, the chalice of gold and precious stones which Joseph of Arimathea would have collected the blood of Christ on the cross, and that the Cathars, its custodians, could have hidden in the cracks pog at Montsegur ? This is just a pious legend, unfortunately, also born of a misunderstanding, but typical fantasies of this troubled time. In 1204, the Crusaders seized Constantinople the reliquary, decorated with a lattice of chrism, which contained the Holy Shroud. This object then disappeared, not without arousing the hope of his miraculous reappearance. However, in the West, the semantic confusion between two Latin words: the "crater" (mesh) and the "crater" (vase) did believe in the existence of the sacred vase, then called the Grail by deformation of the word "crater" in German. Similarly, the disappearance of the true icon (Latin for "vera icona") of Constantinople occasioned by a cons-way translator, the legend of Saint Veronica displaying the shroud which had printed the bloody face of Christ. Besides, how the Holy Grail Would he belonged to the Cathars, who according to their faith there would have been a material object and that works by Satan? But you can feel the remorse in these myths of righteous people for so many crimes and so much blood shed in this gold rush were the Crusades of the 13th century.
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