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Edited by
Ben Kiernan, Yale University, Connecticut,T. M. Lemos, Huron University College, University of Western Ontario,Tristan S. Taylor, University of New England, Australia
General editor
Ben Kiernan, Yale University, Connecticut
In 1208 Pope Innocent III proclaimed a crusade of “extermination” and “expurgation” against the heretics supposedly infesting the lands of the count of Toulouse. What is now known as the “Albigensian Crusade” lasted twenty-one years and was the first holy war in which Christians were guaranteed salvation by killing other Christians. The massacres during the crusade, especially at Béziers in 1209, were “genocidal moments.” The victims, though, were neither an ethnic, national, or racial group. The victims were arguably a regional or possibly a cultural group, but such groups are not covered by the modern legal definition of genocide. Nevertheless, they were deliberately targeted for destruction. Despite accusations of heresy, the victims were not initially a self-consciously different religious group either. Crucially, they were not “Cathars,” which is what most medieval historians and genocide scholars assume the victims to have been. “Catharism” as a medieval heresy never existed; it was an invention of nineteenth-century scholars trying to understand the Albigensian crusade more “scientifically” and less confessionally. Finally, were the individual testimonies collected by the first inquisitions into heretical depravity, established in Toulouse in the aftermath of the Albigensian crusade, analogous to the memories of individuals who witnessed or survived genocides collected by modern tribunals?
This chapter discusses the principal archaeological remains, namely the large numbers of manuscript books which contain the church's views of the topic. It also shows how these groups were fashioned and reshaped in these texts. During the twelfth century the texts proliferate. They combine the older language and themes with the notion that there were new heretics and heresies, and some contain the direct description or refutation of a specific new heresy. During the thirteenth century there is amplification, for example the 1184 decretal forms part of the section on heresy in Gregory IX's Five Books of the Decretals. The chapter explains a more direct description of the two major heresies of the period, those of the Cathars and the Waldensians, while continuing to use the church's vocabulary. The chapter relies on these texts to access the two major heretical movements of the High Middle Ages, and finally provides comment on the main distortions of these texts.
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