Origins
Catharism appeared in Europe around the 11th century and followed the emergence of various heresies. It easily took root in the south of France, which was a tolerant region used to the cohabitation of different religions. The Jews lived peacefully alongside the Catholics and the Muslims occupied Spain on the other side of the Pyrenees. They lived in communities often linked to crafts such as weavers. The designation "Cathar" comes from the Greek catharos meaning "the purified". The Cathars themselves only called themselves good Christians or good men. The Catholics called them Albigensians.
Philosophy and beliefs
The Cathars were therefore Christians. However, they believed that their world was too terrible to be the work of God alone. They believed in a second creative principle. They did not believe that the good tree could bear bad fruit (parable of the good and bad tree in the Gospel of John). God, according to them, could not be the origin of evil. There were thus, for them, two creations, two creators but only one God. They believed in the reincarnation of the spirit and their way of life had to be as close as possible to that of the apostles of Christ. They rejected all the sacraments of the Catholic Church and based their faith on the teachings of the New Testament. They had no places of worship and preached in the villages and on the roads. The only rite they used was "consolament", a laying on of hands and the Bible on the head of the believer before his death. Life was hard in those days, but the simple believer led a normal life, and even had very good contacts with the Catholic priest of the village. The religious, the "Perfect Ones", led an apostolic, almost ascetic life, were vegetarians, rejected sexuality or private property. The Catholic Church began to be concerned in the 12th century, but tried to fight this heresy not by violence but by using the same method of persuasion used by the Cathar preachers, i.e., meeting with the inhabitants and organizing contradictory debates with the clerics... Dominic of Guzman, who would become Saint Dominic, was a famous field preacher.
The Crusade
Faced with the failure of this strategy and the assassination of Pierre de Castelnau, the papal legate. Philip Augustus, king of France, gave in to the demands of Pope Innocent III and called for a crusade against the Albigensians in 1208. The poor Catholic North rushes to the rich Cathar South. One man, Simon de Montfort, took the lead of the crusaders' army, and became ferociously famous throughout Languedoc. This crusade quickly became a war of conquest, so powerful were the political stakes. Indeed, it is difficult to talk about the Cathars and the crusade against the Albigensians without mentioning the political importance of these dramatic events. The Counts of Toulouse were clearly seeking to withdraw from French dependence. Secondly, there was a real risk of competition for the Roman Church. Indeed, the latter was in difficulty because of the instability of the kingdom of Jerusalem and the problems inherent in the Crusades in the Holy Land, which were receiving less and less participation and which were often diverted to military ends by the crusader knights.
Victory of the King of France
From 1209, the crusader army flew from victory to victory: massacre and victory over Béziers, capture of Carcassonne, capture of Fanjeaux and Pamiers... In 1212, the king of Aragon, close to the counts of Toulouse and Carcassonne, sent his army to the city of Muret, near Toulouse, to join the forces of the Occitan knights in a final battle against the French army, but he lost his life. This was the victory of Simon de Montfort. Toulouse was retaken in 1218 and Montfort died during the siege, his head smashed by a catapult held by women. A decade or so will go by where the forces involved will clash, slowly announcing the decline of the Occitan armies until the treaty of Meaux in 1229 which signs the end of the Crusade and was a real cut-off to the wills of independence of the Midi. The county of Toulouse was almost as rich as the rest of the kingdom of France. Unfortunately, the shifting and indecisive positions of the Occitan lords proved fatal. The numerous dissensions between the local lords, throughout the events, were one more element in the collapse of Languedoc. The direct interventions of the kings of France completed the attachment of the former county of Toulouse and Provence to France.
The Inquisition
Peace seems to have returned, the territories are prospering, bastides are appearing... However, there is still an evil that moves along the roads of Occitania and terrorizes the populations: the Inquisition. It practiced "the question", in other words torture, and systematically questioned all the people of Ariege. In 1242, Pierre Roger de Mirepoix massacred the inquisitors in Avignonet, thus starting a revolt in Occitania. The counts of Languedoc, Narbonne and Foix joined a new army of the count of Toulouse and retook, among others, the city of Carcassonne and the town of Béziers. But this wind of revolt did not lead to the expected uprising and the small army had to submit. A pocket of resistance then settled in a few Pyrenean castles, including that of Montségur.
The end of the Cathars and of medieval Occitania
In 1204, the castle of Montsegur was a ruin but, sensing a bad omen coming, a Cathar bishop from Mirepoix asked Raymond de Péreille to rebuild it in order to make it a real place of life and refuge. The castle quickly became one of the high places, physical and spiritual, of Catharism. It underwent four sieges, three of which were unsuccessful, until the fateful month of March 1244 when it fell, thus becoming a high symbol of the Cathar resistance. On March 16, more than 200 Cathars were burned at the stake in a place that is now called the Prat dels Cremats, the Meadow of the Burned. Not one of them renounced his beliefs. They threw themselves into the flames, without a cry, without a complaint, women and children. It is said that they even sang.
