Free The Grand Inquisitor's Manual by Jonathan Kirsch Page B

argument” were now characterized in much harsher and even horrific terms, all designed to inspire fear and panic throughout western Christendom. “The heresy of Catharism gives birth continually to a monstrous brood,” declared Pope Innocent III, “by means of which its corruption is vigorously renewed, after that offspring has passed on to others the canker of its own madness and a detestable succession of criminals emerges.” 47
    Pope Innocent III resolved to escalate the war on heresy by preaching a new crusade, not against the Muslims in the distant Levant but against the Cathars across the frontier in southern France. On November 17, 1207, the pope sent a letter to the king of France, calling on him to raise an army of crusaders to march into the province of Languedoc to exterminate the Cathars. Significantly, the pope offered the same spiritual rewards available to crusaders who traveled all the way to the Holy Land to take up arms against Islam—the pope’s forgiveness for their past sins and the status of a martyr if they fell in battle against the enemy.
    In seeking to cut out the cancer of heresy, however, the pope sanctioned the use of a new and even more radical instrument. By contrast with Saint Bernard and Saint Dominic, who armed themselves only with sermons and texts in their struggles against the Cathars, the crusaders sent into southern France were to be soldiers of Christ in the most literal sense. “For the first time in Europe, a pope was calling upon Christians to kill other Christians,” explains Karen Armstrong. “Innocent was setting a precedent for a new kind of holy war that would become an incurable disease in Europe.” 48
    The crusaders were charged with the solemn task of rooting out heresy throughout Europe but especially in the towns of Toulouse, Agen, and Albi in southern France, where the Cathars were thought to gather in the greatest numbers and where they were sheltered by a defiant local gentry. Albi, as it turns out, was hardly the Vatican of the heretical church, but the name of the town came to be used as a kind of code word for Catharism and served to focus the fears and fantasies of the knights and soldiers who took up the cross. For that reason, the crusade that Pope Innocent III preached in 1207 against the Christian dissenters of France has come to be called the Albigensian Crusade. 49
     
     
    The town of Albi lay in the province of Languedoc, a place-name that literally means “the language of yes” and refers to the fact that the word yes in the dialect of southern France is oc rather than oui. It’s a bit of wordplay that captures the spirit of southern France in the late Middle Ages—easygoing and tolerant, prosperous and independent, a stronghold of the troubadours and the chivalric tradition of courtly love, and a stopping place on the route along which both ideas and merchandise reached Europe from points east. Not surprisingly, the Cathars, too, thrived in the welcoming and open-minded cities of Languedoc.
    Other beneficiaries of the spirit of Languedoc were members of the Jewish community, who fared far better in southern France than elsewhere in medieval Europe. They were not granted full citizenship, but they were permitted to own land, engage in business and the professions, and live where they pleased. They were able to delve into the mystical traditions of Kabbalism, and some historians have suggested that Jewish and Cathar ascetics inspired and influenced each other. What we learn from the example of Languedoc on the eve of the Inquisition is that ordinary men and women, when given the opportunity to explore the varieties of religious experience, do not simply shut up and submit to the dogma offered by the religious authorities.
    One outspoken farmer in medieval Languedoc, for example, was heard to say in the village square that the Bishop of Pamiers and Jesus himself had been brought into the world “through fucking and shitting, rocking back and