738 CATHAR LITERATURE
As a legal instrument to complete the job of rooting out Catharism in Al-
bigensian centers, Pope Gregory IX in 1233 established the Inquisition. He
gave the task to the Dominicans friars. So was born the medieval Inquisition,
which later spread to northern Italy and Germany. (The Spanish Inquisition
established by Ferdinand and Isabella in Spain in 1478, with its notorious
autos-da-fe, was independent of the medieval Inquisition elsewhere in west-
ern Europe and was finally abolished in 1834.) The Dominican inquisitors la-
bored through southern France in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to
extinguish virtually all discoverable remnants of the heretical religion. The In-
quisition kept records of their activities and preserved the documents of
heresy in their archives. We owe our detailed historical knowledge of these
events and of Cathar scripture to these documents.
The Inquisition and the Vatican found not only Catharism subversive, but
also the troubadours, the great symbol of Occitanian and general Provencal
culture. Many of the troubadours were Cathars, and of these, some of the best
known, such as Peire Cardenal, were strongly anticlerical, that is, anti-romains
(anti-Catholic). The troubadour composers—and the jongleurs who per-
formed the troubadour songs—vanished as their noble patrons had vanished
in the massacres of the great families. With the destruction of the two dissent-
ing movements, the Cathars of inner light and the troubadours of outer light,
along with the supporting peasants, nobility, and their political protectors,
power and culture in France moved from the prevailing langue d'oc (in
Provencal, lenga d'oc) in the south to the bleak langue d'o'il north, and the bril-
liant Provencal civilization faded forever.^7
SURVIVAL OF SCRIPTURES
The literature of the Cathars awaits the discovery of its own Nag Hammadi
library of original gnostic scripture. We rely principally on five treatises, in-
cluding the Gospel of the Secret Supper (La Cene secrete), the Anonymous- While Provencal was destroyed, its legacy was unstoppable. Meg Bogin summarizes: "The
troubadour's use of lenga d'oc spurred the development of poetry in all the other nascent lan-
guages of Europe. By the beginning of the thirteenth century, imitations of the Provencal chan-
son, or love song, were being written in Italian, German, Spanish, langue d'o'il [French] and
even English. This medieval poetry produced a double legacy, which continues to determine a
good portion of the western world of feeling. Through Dante's Beatrice, love was proclaimed
the supreme experience of life, and the quest for love, with the lady as its guiding spirit, became
the major theme of western literature" (Bogin, Women Troubadours, 10).