CATHAR LITERATURE 737(jongleur) performer and singer—albas, cansos, sirventes, planes, pastorals
(morning songs, songs, political lyrics, dirges, pastorals); the north had grave
epic and the trouveres, who imitated the troubadours. Out of this melange of
Cathar and Catholic and poetry, the troubadours gave us an age of cosmopol-
itan, witty, and wildly satiric song. In short lyric or ballad, they recounted ad-
ventures and misadventures of carnal and spiritual love. Their cult of courtly
love commingled with a fully secular expression in an accessible vernacular
tongue, and they opened worlds of courtly love from which we have, fortu-
nately perhaps, never recovered. Indeed, it is a commonplace to say that the
first lights of the renaissance, even before the radiant sonneteers of the royal
courts of Sicily, shone in the free-spirited Midi of southern France.
CATHAR AS HERESY AND PAPAL RESPONSE
From the point of view of church orthodoxy in France and Italy, however,
this popular religion was increasing at an alarming rate. Its dualistic, anticler-
ical, and worldly stance was a diabolic heresy and its suppression inevitable.
When it came, the punishment was catastrophic. The fall of the Cathars had
levels of political complexity, with diverse Spanish, northern French, Italian,
and even English interests vying for a piece of the destruction. Pope Innocent
III made the first decisive move, proclaiming the Albigensian Crusade in 1209
against the gnostic heresy, calling in secular forces against the dualists, whom
he offered the same indulgences as given to crusaders: spiritual salvation and
material riches. The papal troops ravaged Toulouse, and in southern France
thousands were slaughtered or burned at the stake. Churches and monaster-
ies were razed, and scriptures burned. Many of the nobility lost their lands
and were also burned. Later the northern barons, under the French king
Saint Louis IX, invaded, and in 1244 they captured the last Cathar fortress,
the famous mountaintop Montsegur in the Pyrenees, bringing the independ-
ent region of the south into a larger France. For the French king his invasion
was not a crusade against Cathar heresy but a war of annexation.
With the fall of the citadel at Montsegur and the capitulation of the nobil-
ity, the Catharist communities went underground. There was a large immi-
gration to Catalonia and Lombardy, and also to Bosnia, where the Bogomils
offered them sanctuary. As for the Cathar church in France, it was not yet
completely crushed, but the great cities of the south—Toulouse, Beziers, Car-
cassone, and Narbonne—lay in ruins. After a hundred years of war and exe-
cutions, there was almost everywhere in southern France a drop in population
of more than half.