For many, Provence immediately conjures up images of crisp blue skies, gently swaying lavender fields, and picturesque village markets. Immortalized by figures such as Marcel Pagnol, Jean Giono, and Lawrence Durrell — and more recently by the writings of Peter Mayle and Julia Child — southern France continues to be viewed as something of a post-modern Arcadia by the hordes of sunburnt tourists that descend every summer upon its beaches, olive groves, and mountains. Having had the good fortune to grow up in that part of the world, I am not one to disagree.
Yet the paradise that is southern France today belies the extreme brutality of its past. For three and a half decades in the early 13th century, the sun-kissed landscapes of Cezanne were set aflame by one of the bloodiest religious wars of the Medieval Era: the Cathar or Albigensian Crusade. The conflict spanned two generations of combatants and resulted in what some have estimated to be tens of thousands of deaths, shocking even contemporary observers by its sheer brutality. It was fought in a land then known as Occitania, a vast swathe of territory which spreads from the borders of today’s Aquitaine to the Pyrenees and the southern Rhone Valley. By its end, the kingdom of France had more than tripled its territory and an ancient religion had been extinguished. The Cathar Crusades also led to the emergence of the Catholic Inquisition as a force to be reckoned with and to important military innovations, such as the invention of the precision stone trebuchet.
The history of this war is filled with larger-than-life characters, such as the colorful Count Raymond VI of Toulouse, Occitania’s most powerful lord. This wily leader and consummate politician had five wives, a string of mistresses, and a natural talent for deceit and dissimulation. Forced to change sides multiple times in the course of the long war, he always kept the interests of the Occitanians in mind. As such, he remained universally loved by his subjects despite his eventual defeat. On the side of the northern crusaders, protagonists such as Simon de Montfort have inspired almost equal measures of admiration and loathing. Combining the zeal of the crusader with the tactical efficiency ofRommel and the brutality of Rachid Dostum, de Montfort was perhaps one of the most effective — and reviled — military commanders of his time.
The Cathar Crusade was not only one of the most consequential wars in the history of Europe, but also one of the most vigorously debated by its contemporaries. Yet despite all of this, it has largely been forgotten. In many ways, the Cathar Crusade has become to the Middle Ages what the Korean War is to the modern era: a massively important conflict that has been surprisingly underexplored.
I hope to help correct this state of affairs by pointing to the lessons that can be drawn from a conflict that in many ways is less esoteric and more relevant in this new era of religious extremism than many may believe.
Conflicts Are Rarely the Result of Only One Factor
In March 1208, Pope Innocent III called for a Crusade against another Christian country, the lands held by Raymond VI. The Vatican argued that the crusade was amply justified: France’s southern territories allegedly crawled with Cathars and other heretics “worse even than the Saracens” that European knights had already been fighting for over a century in the Holy Land. Furthermore, only two months prior, a papal delegate and Cistercian monk, Peter of Castelnau, had been murdered by one of Raymond’s retainers. This act of violence, much like the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo centuries later, would provide the catalyst and justification for one of the largest military enterprises of the Middle Ages and a grinding war of attrition that led to a disproportionate number of civilian casualties.
Read the Remainder at War on the Rocks
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