They were avowedly targeting “heretics,” but since part of their definition of a heretic was anyone who opposed the crusade, this logic was rather self-fulfilling. The crusaders set off across Languedoc, first targeting the lands of the viscount of Béziers and Carcassonne, then more generally fighting anyone who got in their way. Not for nothing did Innocent call him “changeable and crafty, shifty and inconstant.” The crusaders, mostly knights from northern France, assembled at Lyons in June 1209, where Raimond of Toulouse rather neatly wrong-footed the crusade against him by joining it. In the case of the Albigensian crusade, its first target was one man, Raimond VI, Count of Toulouse, whose men had just ambushed and murdered a papal legate. The ideologies that took shape to legitimize medieval oppression later supplied a template for new systems of class domination in the modern capitalist world. They were initially directed specifically against Muslims in Palestine and Spain but became a way in which popes could attempt to mobilize secular troops against a range of papal enemies. Crusades were holy wars instigated by the papacy to be fought by secular recruits. Pope Innocent III called the Albigensian crusade in 1208. The guidebooks tend to tell a simple story of the tolerant, civilized society of the Languedoc region - which was only vaguely under the control of the French crown at the time and to which “France” was a foreign country - being wiped out by ignorant northerners, with alternative religious believers persecuted by orthodox bigotry.Ī closer look at the history of the crusade reveals that it was a landmark in the development of an oppressive social order throughout Europe. In the thirteenth century, the French monarchy fought a ruthless war against some of its own subjects whom the Catholic Church had branded as “heretics.” Unless you have a particular interest in medieval history, you’re mostly likely to have heard about the Cathars and the Albigensian crusade from visiting the south of France, where the “Cathar” castles are a major part of the tourist industry.
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