Contents Updated: Sunday, August 13, 2000
In the history of Europe, there was a widespread expectation of the end of the world in the millennial year 1000 AD. The "Iron Age," the tenth century, the low-water of civilization was ending. No one regarded Rome as the center of light in Europe at any time after it ceased to be Pagan. Its artistic distinction during the Renaissance was because briefly it was then Pagan once more.
Enlightenment came into Europe along two paths far away from Rome, from the east along the valley of the Danube, and from the east, via north Africa and the Straits of Gibraltar, entering Christian Europe by the Pyrenees and the south of France.
During this darkest age of Christendom, in the tenth century, a brilliant and tolerant Moslem civilization flourished in Spain. Its culture crossed the Pyrenees to enlighten the barbarian Christians of Europe. The Moors had most influence in the south of France and even occupied it briefly. The one scholar of the tenth century, Gerbert, Pope Silvester II, belonged to the south of France and learned his science in Moorish Spain.
While the Latin world was so brutalized it stopped thinking, a heresy had deeply taken root in the Armenian district of the Byzantine Empire. It was Paulicianism, a mixture of Gnostic, Manichaean and primitive Christian ideas. One Christian empress of the ninth century slaughtered a hundred thousand of these people, but an emperor of the tenth century still had to transport two hundred thousand of them to the desolate frontier of his empire, next to Bulgaria, to try to suppress the heresy.
The heresy then reappeared in Bulgaria in the sect of the Bogomiles, "Friends of God." The Bogomiles, an earnest and ascetic sect, threatened to win over the entire nation and even the whole of Europe, by sending out missionaries. From the beginning of the eleventh century, people of this semi-Manichaean religion appeared everywhere—usually on the gibbet. The Church had began using its historical holy weapons of persuasion—persecution, torture and murder.
Most European heresies involved Manichaean ideas, themselves taken from Zoroastrian religion. There were two great creative powers, one who made good, and one who made evil. The Persians believed in two supreme principles, but the evil principle—the creator of matter, darkness, the flesh and the Lie or sin—was not equal to Ormuzd, the real God, though in deadly conflict with him, because in the end Ormuzd would destroy the material world and judge everyone's suitability for heaven. This idea was an enticing explanation of the origin and power of evil, and removed from God, the good spirit, the responsibility for matter and flesh. It was more reasonable than Christianity, rejecting the Old Testament and all its moral crudity, regarding Christ as a wonderful spirit but not God, and scorning priests and sacraments. Christendom's consecrated immorality of its priests, monks and nuns, the heresy loathed.
It rivalled Christianity, and would have ousted the more corrupt religion had it not been hacked down, brutally and savagely. The semi-Manichaean Priscillian heresy in Spain was destroyed by Christian butchery by the seventh century. The Arian or Unitarian heresy was widely adopted by the barbarians, but astute political bargaining had induced the Arian Teutonic princes to adopt the Trinity and compel their people to do the same.
In the eleventh century, the Popes and bishops of Christendom were still more interested in wine and women than the souls of their flocks. Bouts of morality kept breaking out, however, to disturb their pleasuring. In 1012 AD, several "Manichaeans" were prosecuted in Germany. In 1017, thirteen canons and priests of the diocese of Orleans were convicted of Manichaeism and burned alive. In 1022, cases were recorded at Liege, in 1030, in Italy and Germany, in 1043, near Chalons in France, in 1052, again in Germany. In the early part of the twelfth century some "Poor Men of Christ" were burned in Germany.
By the middle of the twelfth century, Europe was seething and bubbling with heresy. The name of the more important heretical sect, the Cathars, is the Greek word (kathari) for "the Pure Ones," or "Puritans." They regarded the Church as a corrupt institution, scorned its sacraments, ritual and hierarchy, despised its dissolute monks and nuns, and tried to get back to the pure teaching of Christ—voluntary poverty, strict chastity, brotherly love, and ascetic life.
The Beguines and Beghards, founded by a Belgian priest in the thirteenth century, spread a network of ascetic communities, more like the ancient Essenes and Therapeutae than the Christian monks all over Europe. They were severely persecuted, though their only heresy was that they did as the gospel Christ bade them do.
Substantially the same were the Waldensians, the followers of Peter Waldo, also of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. They called themselves the "Poor in Spirit," and literally obeyed every word of Christ, and so they were branded as heretics and burned in batches, sixty at one time being committed to the flames in Germany in 1211 AD, and some being burned in Spain even earlier.
The famous Flagellants of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries fairly come under the same heading. The world and Church were so corrupt that they expected a speedy end of them, and they did penance for their sins and those of others. The Fratricelli, a detachment from the Franciscan Order whom the clerical corruption drove into heresy, belong to the same period, and were fiercely persecuted.
More important were the Lollards, the followers of John Wyclif in England, and the Hussites of Bohemia. Wyclif's heresy—he was at first supported by his university and the nobles—was really a return to primitive Christianity—Essenism—and it took such root in England that in the middle of the fourteenth century one-tenth of the nation, some historians estimate, were Lollards. It paid the typical penalty of being true to Christ.
Meantime, as the king of Bohemia married an English princess, the Lollard ideas passed to that country, then one of the most enlightened in Europe, and, by the preaching of John Hus, a large part of the nation embraced and developed them. The Hussites scorned the corrupt priests, monks, and nuns, attacked clerical celibacy, confession, the eucharist, and the ritual. Two hundred years of war and savage persecution were needed to suppress them. At one time, most of the nobles of Bohemia were Hussites.
The name of Cathari, was applied to some sects that combined primitive Christian (Essene) morals with some Manichaean philosophy. They were known as Patarenes in Italy, as Publicans in France and Belgium, and by other names in other countries. Their numbers were prodigious in the century chosen as "the great Catholic century"—the thirteenth century. Dante tells us how prevalent heresy, even radical skepticism, was in Italy in his day. Europe was on its way to deserting Roman Christianity, but the Church invented its most savage weapon—the Inquisition.
The Albigensians take their name from Albi, an important town in one of those southern provinces of France which were to that country what southern California is to the United States. In these southern provinces, the brilliant example of the Spanish Moors was known best, and during the eleventh century the heresy of the Bogomiles was imported into them by missionaries from Bulgaria or Bosnia.
In the Albigeois district, the majority of the population went over to the new religion. St Bernard of Clairvaux, the most famous preacher of the time, made a campaign there in 1147 AD. The churches were deserted and he was unable to make any impression. The heresy spread over France, Belgium, western Germany, Spain and northern Italy. The Papacy was alarmed! These Cathari numbered at least hundreds of thousands in France alone.
Pope after Pope angrily urged the secular powers to persecute them. Alexander III, in the Lateran Council of 1179, urged the use of force against them. To princes he gave the right to imprison offenders and, appealing to their greed, to confiscate their property. To all who would "take up arms" against them, he promised two years' remission of penance and even greater privileges.
The Cathars were burned or imprisoned in many places but in the south of France the princes and nobles favored them and were proud of their industry and integrity in a corrupt world. In 1167, the head of the Paulician sect, from which evolved the Bogomile sect and then the Albigensian sect, went to Albi, held a great synod, consecrated five new bishops, and gave the religion a splendid public triumph.
This was the situation when, in 1198, Innocent III donned the Papal tiara. Profoundly religious Popes such as Gregory I, Gregory VII, and Innocent III did Western civilization the most deadly injury.
For nine years, Innocent had monks preaching in the heretical provinces urging the bishops and princes to persecute, but they were quite ineffective. His chief legate, Pierre de Castelnau, received instructions in 1207 to arrange a warlike campaign of the princes, and most of the smaller nobles agreed. In the thirteenth century, war meant unlimited loot, and the Albigensian towns were amongst the most prosperous in Europe.
In the bad atmosphere created, the legate was murdered. Innocent angrily proclaimed that Raymond, Count of Toulouse, was responsible. The accusation was unlikely, and, in later life, he admitted there was no evidence. The "great" Pope sent out a ringing call to arms, and heavily threatened Christian princes and knights who did not obey it.
There was no need of threats. If the president of the United States informed the gangsters of Chicago—Christian knights in those days had no higher ethic—that they could take every pimp and drug baron to invade and sack San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego, you have a rough parallel. A contemporary poet said that twenty thousand knights and two hundred thousand footmen converged upon the Albigensians. They were led by the Abbot of Citeaux—as bloody a priest as Torquemada—and a seedy Franco-English adventurer, Simon de Montfort, whose purse was empty. The King of France was not in it—at first, only because his terms to the Pope were exorbitant.
The Albigensians were still so strong after two years of the most brutal carnage that, when the Pope renewed the "crusade" in 1214, a fresh hundred thousand "pilgrims" had to be summoned. It proves the scale of the "heresy."
Innocent boasted that they took five hundred towns and castles from the heretics, and they butchered every man, woman and child in each town when they took it. Noble ladies with their daughters were thrown down wells, and large stones flung upon them. Knights were hanged in batches of eighty.
When, at the first large town, soldiers asked how they could distinguish between heretics and orthodox, the Cistercian abbot raged:
Kill them all, God will know his own.
They put to the sword the forty thousand surviving men, women and children. Today Christian writers dispute these things, but they are recorded in the bragging words of the Catholics of the time.
The Pope's behaviour during these horrible years was revolting and is known in full from his letters. Raymond of Toulouse, to spare his people, submitted before the crusade began, although the Pope expressly told his legates to "deceive him and pass to the extirpation of the other heretics." His brutal treatment of Raymond, without any trial, earned the censure even of the king of France.
He stopped the crusade after two years of almost unparalleled butchery, then yielded to the fanaticism of the monks and the greed of the soldiers, and reopened it. He was plainly sickened by the slaughter and the vile passions of his servants, but he made vast material profit for the Papacy out of the monumental crime, and he left the world, which he soon left, a gift as deadly and revolting as his massacre—the foundation-stone of the Inquisition.
A word of caution about the literature of these matters. No historian, even Catholic, questions that the Pope summoned this "crusade" and nearly annihilated one of the finest bodies of men and women of the time. But were there really forty thousand killed at Biziers, or was it only ten thousand men, women, and children, especially women and children, who had their throats cut when the fighting was over? And did not the Albigensians hold opinions which were socially mischievous?
Paulists and Jesuits throw dust in the eyes of Christians, so that they will not see them clearly. "Improvements" to history have entered works from which the public expects truth not lies. Joseph McCabe has declared there is not a wholly unbiased Catholic scholar in the world, and he should know as a former teacher of many of them.
In one article on the tribunal of the Inquisition in a well known twentieth century encyclopaedia, a Catholic scholar, Canon Vacandard, began by declaring that the Spanish Inquisition was outside the scope of his article. Yet, the Spanish Inquisition was not treated anywhere else in the Encyclopedia. Then he said:
From the twelfth century onward the repression of heresy was the great business of Church and State. The distress caused, particularly in the north of Italy and the south of France, by the Cathari or Manichaeans, whose doctrine wrought destruction to society as well as to faith, appalled the leaders of Christianity. On several occasions, in various places, people and rulers at first sought justice in summary conviction and execution, culprits were either outlawed or put to death. The Church for a long time opposed these rigorous measures… The death-penalty was never included in any system of repressions.
This Catholic apologist is lying through his teeth. The death-penalty was introduced at the dictation of Christian bishops and made a part of European law by the Christian emperors of the fourth and fifth centuries. For many countries, it remained the law, as it had been for more than eight hundred years. Canon lawyers dispute how far the old law applied in the Middle Ages, but apply it did.
So, the "people and rulers" did these monstrous things while the Church supposedly tried to restrain them. The Church has always expected its followers to be fools. The ruler and people never moved against heretics without the impulsion of the Church, and the Papacy complained every decade at this time that it could not get rulers to apply its own "rigorous measures:" exile, infamy, confiscation and destruction of the heretics' homes. Innocent III demanded the death sentence and launched his crusade of murder and theft precisely because he could not get "people and rulers" to proceed otherwise.
Indifferent to the memory of those hundreds of thousands of butchered innocents and unflinching in their lies, modern Christian apologists can proclaim that they were "dangerous to society." How? They advocated voluntary poverty and virginity! Is that not what Christ advocated? We know this from their bitterest enemies, so can accept it as the truth. Rome murdered a few hundred thousand "heretics" because they were true Christians.
"Oh dear," says the money grubbing modern Christian, "That is all very well but how could society persist if there were no private property, no soldiers (they opposed war) no procreation of children?" The answer then as now was that these counsels of Christ were for the elect few, the "perfect," but ordinary "believers" could own property, should marry and must bear arms in defence of their Lords and the Church.
Catholic theologians say the Albigensians were "offended by the excessive outward splendour of Catholic preachers." Pope Innocent wrote a letter in 1204 to his Legate. It is a scorching exposure of the clerical immorality which the Catholic scholar calls "outward splendour." Innocent talks of the mistresses of the priests and the monks everywhere, and says that their bishops can hunt and gamble, but are "dumb dogs that cannot even bark."