The Albigensian Crusade

Languedoc and the Call to Crusade

In the early thirteenth century Languedoc, in southern France, was one of the richest and most cultured regions of Europe, a land of independent towns and troubadour poetry, loosely ruled by the counts of Toulouse and the Trencavel viscounts of Béziers and Carcassonne. It was also the region where dissent from Rome ran strongest. A century earlier Peter of Bruys and Henry of Lausanne had preached there. Now Waldensian preachers moved through its towns, and, above all, the dualist teachers the Catholics called Cathars had organized their own churches and bishops and were honored by many nobles as the good men.

Rome tried preaching first. Cistercian monks served as papal legates, and from 1206 a Spanish canon named Dominic went among the people as a barefoot, begging preacher, debating the Cathars in public. The results were small. In January 1208 one of the legates, the Cistercian Pierre de Castelnau, who had excommunicated Count Raymond VI of Toulouse, was murdered near Saint-Gilles by a man said to be one of the count's retainers. Raymond's guilt was never proven.

Innocent III answered by calling the knights of northern France to a crusade, offering the indulgence granted for the Holy Land in return for forty days of service, along with the lands of any lord who protected heretics. Raymond VI hurried to make his peace. In June 1209 he was scourged before the church at Saint-Gilles and took the cross himself, turning the army toward the lands of his young nephew, Raymond-Roger Trencavel.