add definition to the bays. The main vaults are supported by the smaller vaults of the
chapels, as well as by external buttresses.
Late Gothic decoration of the 15th and 16th centuries brings a delicacy to the
appearance of the interior. The Amboise family, who were bishops at Albi at this period,
commissioned painters, primarily from Italy, to cover the vaults and walls. A Last
Judgment is on the west wall, and Old and New Testament subjects, painted by
Bolognese artists between 1508 and 1514, adorn the vaults. The choir screen is a late
15th-century masterpiece of intricately carved canopies, pinnacles, and sculpted figures.
This decoration transforms a fortress-cathedral of the 13th and 14th centuries into a
refined expression of Late Gothic taste.
Karen Gould
[See also: ALBIGENSIAN CRUSADE; SAINT-GILLES; TRENCAVEL]
Biget, Jean-Louis. Histoire d’Albi. Toulouse: Privat, 1983.
——. “Un procès d’inquisition à Albi en 1300.” Cahiers de Fanjeaux 6(1971):273–341.
Davis, Georgene W. The Inquisition at Albi, 1299–1300: Text of Register and Analysis. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1948.
Hauréau, Barthélemy. Bernard Délicieux et l’Inquisition albigeoise (1300–1320). Paris: Hachette,
1877.
Mâle, Émile. La cathédrale d’Albi. Paris: Hartmann, 1950.
Neirinck, Danièle. “Les impôts directs communaux à Albi du XIII siècle au milieu du XIV siècle
(calculs, composantes, évolution).” In Actes du 102e Congrès National des Sociétés Savantes,
Limoges, 1977: Section de Philologie et d’Historie jusqu’à 1610. Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale,
1979.
ALBIGENSIAN CRUSADE
. Name given to the series of military campaigns that began in the spring of 1209 as part
of the effort to eradicate the Cathar heresy, an important center of which was the town of
Albi in southern France.
France’s Languedoc and Midi regions, together with northern Italy, had long offered
fertile ground to religious heterodoxy. Geography played a key role in this. These
regions’ traditional involvement in the diverse cultural, commerical, and intellectual life
of the Mediterranean exposed them to a steady stream of new religious and philosophical
thought; and their relative lack of, or freedom from, an effective centralized political
authority, a situation owing much to the disjointed topography of the territories, made it
easy for dissenting ideas to take root. Not only did none of the established religious or
civil authorities have the de facto power to suppress heresy when it appeared, but their
very inability to exert that power inevitably inspired many local inhabitants to question
the de jure authority of their supposed leaders. In a world where popular belief in such
things as a “pure” river’s inability to receive the “corrupt” body of an accused criminal
(the underlying assumption behind trials by ordeal), the failure to exert power made it
easier for people to doubt the validity of the authority in whose name that power was
supposedly levied.
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