Heretical movements appeared in southern France as early as 1120, but an identifiable
Catharism cannot be detected until the 1140s and 1150s. Despite its rigors, Catharism
appealed to all social levels, including the nobility in Languedoc, and to men and women
alike. Its fast-growing popularity led the church to organize episcopally directed
preaching missions, and the Third Lateran Council in 1179 enjoined all believers to give
their bishops aid in the struggle to root out the heresy, including physical force. But force
was not used at once. Instead, preachers like St. Dominic and his followers were
dispatched, courts of inquiry (the early Inquisition) were established, and ineffective or
corrupt bishops were deposed. By 1204, however, Pope Innocent III decided that stronger
measures were needed and called upon the Capetian king Philip II Augustus to take arms
against the rebels. Philip demurred, citing his current difficulties with King John of
England, and matters came to a standstill as papal energies were drawn to the tangled
affairs of the Fourth Crusade then getting underway in Venice.
On January 14, 1208, however, a papal legate in Languedoc was murdered, and
suspicion fell upon the count of Toulouse, Raymond VI, widely reputed to have Catharist
sympathies. Innocent proclaimed a crusade against the heretics, whom he regarded as a
worse threat to Christendom than even the Muslims, and against their protectors and
those who tolerated the presence of heterodoxy. By the spring of 1209, a large army had
convened, drawn from across Europe. Raymond of Toulouse submitted to the church and
underwent a penitential scourging, but others fared worse. The viscount of Béziers and
Carcassonne, who was also lord of the territory surrounding Albi, saw his lands invaded
and his subjects fiercely cut down. Simon de Montfort, a middling baron from the Île-de-
France and a leader of the crusade, took command of the Trencavel lands and turned
Béziers into the base from which annual campaigns against the remaining heretics were
launched.
Political and strategic matters quickly became complicated. Raymond of Toulouse’s
failure to fulfill his penitential vows drew Simon’s angry attention, and when he directed
the crusade against Toulouse throughout 1211 and 1212 Simon found himself battling the
king of Aragon, who had come to the aid of Raymond, his brother-in-law. This king,
Peter the Catholic, was at that time one of Christendom’s great champions, having played
a role in the decisive Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa against the Muslims of Spain, which
had effectively broken the power of the Islamic princes over the bulk of the peninsula,
and his opposition to Simon gave the pope an excuse to abolish the crusade privileges
bestowed upon those fighting the Cathars. Innocent by this time wanted desperately to
raise soldiers for another crusade to the Holy Land and felt that the drawn-out Cathar
affair undermined his hopes. Simon, however, defeated Peter at the Battle of Muret in
September 1213, leaving the Aragonese ruler dead on the field and the crusading army in
control of most of Raymond’s lands in southern France.
The towns of the region, regardless of their religious attitudes, then rebelled against
Simon’s growing authority, which they viewed as an unwarranted abrogation of their
traditional independence. When Simon was killed in a skirmish outside Toulouse in 1218,
few mourned. The new pope, Honorius III, restored crusader privileges to those involved
in the fight against the Cathars but with little result. Matters remained stalemated until
1226, when King Louis VIII of France led his own crusading force southward, as much
in the hope of securing a Capetian outlet to the Mediterranean as out of a desire to defend
orthodoxy. The Treaty of Meaux-Paris, signed in early 1229, formally ended the
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