A more modern fortress that was built upon the site of the Cathar’s last stronghold in Montsegur France.

Have you ever heard of the Cathars before? Do not be embarrassed if you haven’t because it isn’t something that is taught in history books. Probably because it paints Catholicism as a whole in a very bad light. In Western civilization we are taught that Christianity, in general, was a good thing and that the pagans needed to be converted for their own good. Nothing could be further from the truth, as you shall soon find out.

The Cathars, also known as the the Albigensians, were a sect of Christianity that did not fall in line with the Catholic Church. They were located in mainly southern France and northern Italy and were a Gnostic form of Christianity that believed in two separate gods. One God, who was from the Old Testament, was considered to be evil because they created the physical world. They would sometimes call this God Satan. The other God, who was from the New Testament, was considered to be good and that they created the spiritual realm. In order to reach the spiritual realm you had to reject sex. gluttony and all of the things that were deemed evil in the physical world. They also believed that anybody, including women, could hear another person’s confession. As you can imagine the Catholic Church wasn’t having any of this.

Pope Innocent III declared a crusade against the Cathars in 1209, when efforts to curb their beliefs did not go as planned. He offered free confiscated Cathar lands to any French nobleman who took part in the crusade. The Crusaders numbered about 10,000 and once in southern France they would besiege towns and cities which were known to have a large population of Cathars. The most famous of these took place in the town of Beziers. The town, which was made up of both Catholics and Cathars, refused to send the Cathars out to be killed even though their lives would have been spared if they had done so. So, the papal legate Arnaud Amalric ordered the destruction of the town. When asked how the soldiers could tell the Cathars from the Catholics he famously said ‘Kill them all! God will know his own!’. Approximately 20,000 civilians died in the attack, which was the population of the entire town.

The burning of the Cathars at Montsegur.

The official end of this crusaders war was in 1229, however the Cathars still weren’t totally wiped out as yet. Because of this an Inquisition was organized in 1233 to root out the remaining Cathars in the south of France. 183 Cathars were burned alive on May the 13th 1239, because they refused to recant or convert. Soon there was only one Cathar stronghold left and that was the fortress of Montsegur. After a siege of almost a year about 240 Cathars were burned alive in a huge fire at the base of the hill. There were still small pockets of them after this in southern France but within one hundred years they were all gone. Their sacred texts were destroyed and their failure to find new converts lead to this happening. Soon after the Cathars that lived in northern Italy were also gone.

The Cathars were the victims of a genocide just because they had a different set of religious beliefs. There were also other early forms of Christianity who suffered a similar fate. Christianity, and the other Abrahamic religions, have a lot to answer for when it comes to all of the pain and suffering that they have caused through the centuries.