Catharism
Catharism is the doctrine of the Cathars (or Albigensians), a Christian religious movement of a Gnostic nature that spread throughout Europe Western in the mid-11th century century and managed to take root around the XII among the inhabitants of the French South, especially in Languedoc, where it had the protection of some feudal lords vassals of the Crown of Aragon.
Influenced by Manichaeism in its Paulician and Bogomil stages, Catharism affirmed a creative duality (God and Satan) and preached salvation through asceticism and strict rejection of the material world, perceived by the Cathars as the work of the devil.
In response, the Catholic Church considered his doctrines heretical. After a missionary attempt, and faced with its growing influence and extension, the Church ended up invoking the support of the French crown to achieve its violent eradication from 1209 through the Albigensian Crusade. At the end of the 13th century the movement, weakened by long persecution, went underground and gradually died out.
Etymology
The name "Cathar" probably comes from the Greek καθαρός (katharós): 'pure'. One of the earliest extant references is a quote from Eckbert von Schönau, who wrote about heretics of Cologne in 1181: «Hos nostra Germania cátharos appéllat».
The Cathars were also called “Albigensians”. This name originates from the late XII century, used by the chronicler Geoffroy du Breuil in 1181, and refers to the city Occitan from Albi (the old Albiga), but this denomination does not seem very exact, since the center of the Cathar culture was in Toulouse and in the neighboring districts. Perhaps, because they considered themselves pure, they called themselves albinos, which would have its origin in the root alb, which means white, from which names such as Albania derive. They also received the name of "poblicantes", the latter term being a degeneration of the name of the Paulicians, with whom they were confused.
It was also called "the weavers' sect" due to the fact that weavers and cloth vendors were its main disseminators in Western Europe.
Beliefs
The roots of the Cathar belief come from Gnosticism and Manichaeism. Consequently, his theology was radically dualistic, based on the belief that the universe was made up of two worlds in utter conflict, a spiritual one created by God and a material one wrought by Satan.
The Cathars believed that the physical world had been created by Satan, similar to the Gnostics who spoke of the Demiurge. However, the Gnostics of the I century did not identify the Demiurge with the Devil, probably because the concept of the Devil was not popular in that time, while it became more and more popular during the Middle Ages.
According to the Cathar understanding, the Kingdom of God is not of this world. God created heavens and souls. The Devil created the material world, wars and the Catholic Church. This, with its earthly reality and the spread of faith in the Incarnation of Christ, was according to the Cathars a tool of corruption.
For the Cathars, men are a transitory reality, a “garment” of the angelic seed. They affirmed that sin occurred in heaven and that it has been perpetuated in the flesh. Traditional Catholic doctrine, on the other hand, considers that the wine given by the flesh infects the inner man, the spirit, which would be in a state of fall as a consequence of original sin. For the Catholics, faith in God redeemed, while for the Cathars it required a knowledge (gnosis) of the previous state of the spirit in order to purge its mundane existence. For Catharism, there was no acceptance of what was given, of matter, considered a dark fallacy that hindered salvation.
The Cathars also believed in reincarnation. The souls would reincarnate until they were capable of self-knowledge that would lead them to the vision of divinity and thus be able to escape from the material world and rise to the immaterial paradise. The way to escape the cycle was to live an ascetic life, uncorrupted by the world. Those who followed these rules were known as Perfect. The Perfect Ones considered themselves heirs of the apostles, with powers to annul people's sins and ties to the material world.
They denied baptism because of the implication of water, a material element and therefore impure, and because it was an institution of John the Baptist and not of Christ. They were also radically opposed to marriage for the purpose of procreation, since they considered it a mistake to bring a pure soul to the material world and imprison it in a body. They refused to eat food from the generation, such as eggs, meat and milk (yes, fish, since it was then considered a spontaneous "fruit" of the sea).
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Following these precepts, the Cathars practiced a life of iron asceticism, strict chastity and vegetarianism. They interpreted virginity as abstaining from everything capable of "earthly" the spiritual element.
Another Cathar belief opposed to Catholic doctrine was their claim that Jesus was not incarnated, but was an apparition that manifested itself to show the way to God. They believed that it was not possible for a good God to have incarnated in a material form, since all material objects were contaminated by sin. This specific belief was called Docetism. Furthermore, they believed that God, as described in the Old Testament, was really the Devil who had created the world; this was also pointed out to his qualities ("jealous", "vindictive", "blood") and his activities as "God of War". The Cathars therefore denied the veracity of the Old Testament.
The consolamentum was the only sacrament of the Cathar faith, with the exception of a kind of symbolic Eucharist, the Melioramentum, without transubstantiation (if Christ was an exclusively spiritual entity, not incarnate, the bread would not could become the body of Christ).
The Cathars also considered oaths to be a sin, since they linked people to the material world.
The popular Occitan chant Lo Boièr is associated with Catharism, to the point of being considered its official anthem.
History
Origins
Catharism reached Western Europe from Eastern Europe through trade routes, hand in hand with Manichean religions displaced by Byzantium. These religions settled in the West and spread to different countries. For this reason, the Albigensians also received the name of Bulgars (Bougres) and maintained links with the Bogomils of Thrace, with whose beliefs they had many points in common and even more with that of their predecessors, the Paulicians. However, it is difficult to form an exact idea of their doctrines, since few Cathar texts exist. The few that still exist (Rituel cathare de Lyon and Nouveau Testament en provençal) contain scant information about their beliefs and practices.
The first proper Cathars appeared in Limousin between 1012 and 1020. Some were discovered and executed in the Languedoc city of Toulouse in 1022. The growing community was condemned at the synods of Charroux (1028) and Toulouse (1056). Preachers were sent to combat Cathar propaganda in the early 12th century. However, the Cathars gained influence in Occitania thanks to the protection provided by William, Duke of Aquitaine, and by a significant proportion of the Occitan nobility. The people were impressed by the Perfects and by the anti-priestly preaching of Pierre de Bruys and Henri de Lausanne in Périgord.
Punishment of the Cathars
In 1147, Pope Eugene III sent a legacy to the affected districts to stop the progress of the Cathars. The few and isolated successes of Bernardo de Claraval could not hide the poor results of the mission or the power of the Cathar community in Occitania at the time. The missions of Cardinal Pedro (of San Crisogono) to Tolosa and Tolosado in 1178, and of Enrique, Cardinal-Bishop of Albano, in 1180-1181, obtained momentary successes. The armed expedition of Enrique de Albano, which took the fortress of Lavaur, did not extinguish the movement.
The persistent decisions of councils against the Cathars in this period—particularly those of the Council of Tours (1163) and the Third Lateran Council (1179)—did hardly have much effect. When Innocent III came to power in 1198, he resolved to suppress the Cathar movement with the Fourth Lateran Council's definition of the faith.
Combat against the Cathar doctrine
As a result of this fact, the increasingly real possibility that Innocent III decided to resolve the Cathar problem through a crusade caused a very important change in Occitan politics: the alliance of the Counts of Toulouse with the House of Aragon. Thus, if Raymond V (1148-1194) and Alfonso II of Aragon (1162-1196) had always been rivals, in 1200 the marriage between Ramón VI of Tolosa (1194-1222) and Eleanor of Aragon, sister of Pedro II, was arranged. the Catholic, who, in 1204, would end up expanding the domains of the Crown of Aragon with Languedoc by marrying María, the only heiress of William VIII of Montpellier.
At first, Pope Innocent III tried peaceful conversion, sending legates to affected areas. The legates had full powers to excommunicate, issue interdicts, and even remove local prelates. However, they did not only have to deal with the Cathars, with the nobles who protected them, but also with the bishops of the area, who rejected the extraordinary authority that the pope had conferred on the legates. To such an extent that, in 1204, Innocent III suspended the authority of the bishops in Occitania. However, they did not obtain results, even after having participated in the colloquium between Catholic priests and Cathar preachers, presided over in Béziers in 1204, by King Pedro II of Aragon.
The Cistercian monk Pedro de Castelnau, a papal legate known for unceremoniously excommunicating nobles who protected the Cathars, rose to the top by excommunicating the Count of Toulouse, Raymond VI (1207) as an accomplice to heresy. The legate was assassinated near the abbey of Saint Gilles, where he had met Raymond VI, on January 14, 1208, by a squire of Raymond of Toulouse. The squire affirmed that he was not acting by order of his lord, but this fact, hardly credible, was the trigger that began the crusade against the Albigensians.
The pope summoned King Philip II of France to lead a crusade against the Cathars, but that first summons was dismissed by the French monarch, who was more urged by the conflict with the English king Juan Sin Tierra. Then Peter the Catholic, who had just married, went to Rome where Innocent III solemnly crowned him and, in this way, the King of the Crown of Aragon became a vassal of the Holy See, with which he promised to pay a tribute. With this gesture, Pedro the Catholic intended to protect his domains from the attack of a possible crusade. The Pope, for his part, suspicious of the attitude of the Aragonese king towards the Occitan princes suspected of tolerating heresy (and even of practicing it), never wanted to delegate the leadership of the crusade to Peter the Catholic. Subsequently, the Aragonese king and his brother Alfonso II of Provence took action against the Provencal Cathars.
Crusade Against Heresy
In 1207, at the same time that Innocent III renewed the calls for the crusade against the heretics, now addressed not only to the King of France, but also to the Duke of Burgundy and the counts of Nevers, Bar and Dreux, among others, the papal legate Pedro de Castelnau issued a sentence of excommunication against Raymond VI of Tolosa, since the count of Tolosa had not accepted the peace conditions proposed by the legate, in which the Occitan barons were obliged not to admit Jews into the administration of their domains, to return the looted goods to the Church and, above all, to persecute heretics. As a result of the excommunication, Raymond VI had a very stormy and conflictive meeting with Pedro de Castelnau in Sant Geli in January 1208, from which no agreement emerged.
Facing the futility of diplomatic efforts, the pope decreed that all land owned by the Cathars could be confiscated at will and that anyone who fought for forty days against the "heretics" would be freed from their sins. The crusade achieved the adherence of practically all the nobility of northern France. It is therefore not surprising that nobles from the north flocked south to fight. Innocent entrusted the direction of the crusade to King Philip II Augustus of France, who, although he declined to participate, did allow his vassals to join the expedition.
The arrival of the crusaders will produce a situation of civil war in Occitania. On the one hand, due to his disputes with his nephew, Ramón Roger Trencavel —Viscount of Albi, Béziers and Carcassonne—, Raymond VI of Toulouse led the Crusader army towards the domains of Trencavel, together with other Occitan lords, such as the Count of Valentines, that of Auvergne, the Viscount of Anduze and the Bishops of Bordeaux, Bazas, Cahors and Agen. On the other hand, in Tolosa there is a strong social conflict between the "white company", created by Bishop Folquet to fight usurers and heretics, and the "black company". The bishop obtains the adhesion of the popular sectors, faced with the rich, many of whom were Cathars.
The battle of Béziers, which, according to the chronicler of the time, Guillermo de Tudela, obeyed a preconceived plan of the crusaders to exterminate the inhabitants of the bastide or fortified towns that resisted them, induced the rest of the cities to surrender without fighting, except Carcassonne, which, besieged, will have to surrender due to lack of water. Here, however, the crusaders, as they had negotiated with King Pedro the Catholic (Ramón Roger Trencavel's feudal lord), did not eliminate the population, but simply forced them to abandon the city. Ramón Roger Trencavel dies in Carcassonne. Its domains are granted by the papal legate to the French nobleman Simón de Montfort, who conquers between 1210 and 1211 the Cathar strongholds of Bram, Minerva, Termes, Cabaret and Lavaur (the latter with the help of the white company of Bishop Folquet de Tolosa). From then on he began to act against the Cathars, condemning them to die at the stake.
Battle of Muret
The battle of Béziers, in which after the capture of the city, all its inhabitants were put to the sword by the troops of Simón de Montfort, will revive a feeling of rejection of the crusade among the Occitan powers. Thus, in 1209, shortly after the fall of Carcassonne, Raymond VI and the Toulouse consuls refused to hand over the Cathars who had taken refuge in the city to Arnaldo Amalric. As a consequence, the legate pronounced a second sentence of excommunication against Raymond VI and launched an interdict against the city of Tolosa.
To ward off the threat that the anti-Cathar crusade posed against all the Occitan powers, Raymond VI, after having met with other Christian monarchs —the Holy Roman Emperor Otto IV, King Philip II Augustus of France and Peter the Catholic of Aragon—, tries to obtain more favorable reconciliation conditions from Innocent III. The pope agrees to resolve the religious and political problem of Catharism at an Occitan council. However, in the conciliar meetings of Saint Gilles (July 1210) and Montpellier (February 1211), the Count of Tolosa rejects reconciliation when the legate Arnaldo Amalric asks for conditions such as the expulsion of the knights from the city, and his departure to the Holy Land.
After the Council of Montpellier, and with the support of all the Occitan powers —princes, lords of castles or urban communes threatened by the crusade—, Raymond VI returned to Tolosa and expelled Bishop Folquet. Immediately afterwards, Simón de Montfort began the siege of Tolosa in June 1211, but had to withdraw due to the resistance of the city.
In order to confront Simon de Montfort, seen in Occitania as a foreign occupier, the Occitan powers needed a powerful ally of unquestionable Catholic orthodoxy, to prevent de Montfort from demanding the preaching of a new crusade. Thus, Raymond VI, the consuls of Toulouse, the Count of Foix and the Count of Comenge addressed the King of Aragon, Peter the Catholic, a vassal of the Holy See after his coronation in Rome in 1204 and one of the architects of the victory. against the Muslims in Las Navas de Tolosa (July 1212). Also, in 1198, Peter the Catholic had taken action against the heretics in his domain.
In the Occitan political and religious conflict, Peter the Catholic, never favorable or tolerant of the Cathars, intervened to defend his vassals threatened by the robbery of Simon de Montfort. The French baron, even after agreeing to the marriage of his daughter Amicia with the son of Pedro the Catholic, Jaime —the future Jaime I (1213-1276)—, continued to attack the Occitan vassals of the Aragonese king. On his part, Peter the Catholic was seeking reconciliation measures, and thus, in 1211, he occupied the castle of Foix with the promise of ceding it to Simón de Montfort only if it was shown that the count was not hostile to the Church.
At the beginning of 1213, Innocent III, having received the complaint from Peter the Catholic against Simon de Montfort for preventing reconciliation, ordered Arnaldo Amalric, then Archbishop of Narbonne, to negotiate with Peter the Catholic and start the pacification of Languedoc. However, in the synod of Lavaur, to which the Aragonese king attended, Simón de Montfort rejected the conciliation and declared himself in favor of the deposition of the Count of Tolosa, despite the attitude of Raymond VI, who was in favor of accepting all the conditions of the Holy See. In response to Simon, Peter the Catholic declared himself protector of all the threatened Occitan barons and of the municipality of Tolosa.
In spite of everything, seeing that this was the only sure way to eradicate the «heresy», Pope Innocent III sides with Simon de Montfort, thus reaching a situation of armed confrontation, resolved in the battle of Muret on September 12, 1213, in which the Aragonese king, defender of Raymond VI and the Occitan powers, is defeated and assassinated. Immediately afterwards, Simón de Montfort entered Tolosa accompanied by the new papal legate, Pedro de Benevento, and Luis, son of Philip II Augustus of France. In November 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council recognized Simon de Montfort as Count of Tolosa, dispossessing Raymond VI, who went into exile at the Court of England.
In 1216, Simon de Montfort paid homage at the Paris court to King Philip II Augustus of France as Duke of Narbonne, Count of Toulouse, and Viscount of Béziers and Carcassonne. It was, however, an ephemeral domain. In 1217, a revolt led by Raymond the Younger —the future Ramon VII of Toulouse (1222-1249)— broke out in Languedoc, culminating in the death of Simón de Monfort during a siege in 1218 and with the return of Raymond VI to Toulouse., father of Raymond the Younger.
End of the war
The war ended definitively with the Treaty of Paris (1229), by which the King of France dispossessed the House of Tolosa of most of its fiefdoms and that of Beziers (the Trencavels) of all of them. The independence of the Occitan princes was coming to an end. However, Catharism did not die out.
The Inquisition was established in 1229 to completely eradicate the doctrine. Operating in southern Toulouse, Albi, Carcassonne and other cities throughout the 13th century and much of the 14th century, it was successful in the eradication of the movement.
From May 1243 to March 1244, the Cathar citadel of Montsegur was besieged by the troops of the Seneschal of Carcassonne and the Archbishop of Narbonne, Pierre Amiel. On March 16, 1244, an act took place, in which the Cathar leaders, as well as more than two hundred followers, were thrown into a huge bonfire in the prat dels cremats (meadow of the burned) at the foot of of the castle. Furthermore, the pope (through the Council of Narbonne in 1235 and the bull Ad extirpanda in 1252) decreed severe punishments against all laymen suspected of sympathy with the Cathars.
Persecuted by the Inquisition and abandoned by the nobles, the Cathars became more and more rare, hiding in the forests and mountains, and meeting only clandestinely. The town made some attempts to free itself from the French yoke and the Inquisition, breaking out in revolts at the beginning of the XIV century. But at this point the sect was exhausted and could not find new adherents. After 1330, the records of the Inquisition barely contain proceedings against the Cathars.
Similar movements
The Paulicians were a similar movement. They had been deported from Cappadocia to the Thrace region of southeastern Europe by the Byzantine emperors in the IX century, where they joined with—or more likely became—the Bogomils. During the second half of the 12th century, they had great strength and influence in Bulgaria, Albania and Bosnia. They divided into two branches, known as the Albanians (absolutely dual) and the Garatenses (dual but moderate).
These heretical communities arrived in Italy during the 11th and 12th centuries. The Milanese adherents to this creed received the name patarini (patarinos or patarines), due to their origin from Pataria, a street in Milan very frequented by groups of needy (pataro or patarro alluded to the rag). The Patarines movement gained some importance in the 11th century century as a reformist movement.
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