Albigensian Crusade

From 1209 to 1229, armies drawn mainly from northern France waged a crusade in Languedoc, in what is now southern France, against the Cathars, a religious movement the Catholic Church condemned as heretical. Proclaimed by Pope Innocent III, the campaign soon became a war of conquest against the region's lords, above all the counts of Toulouse. It ended with the south brought under the French crown, while the Inquisition that followed gradually extinguished Catharism. Some historians have described the campaign as genocide.

The Cathars, also called Albigensians after the town of Albi, held dualist beliefs: they taught that the material world was evil, the work of a power opposed to the good God of pure spirit. They rejected the Catholic priesthood and sacraments; their leaders, the perfects, lived under strict rules. Languedoc was a land apart from northern France, with its own Occitan language, a patchwork of lords and prosperous towns such as Toulouse, and a comparatively tolerant atmosphere. In parts of the region Aragon counted for more than the French king.

Innocent III, pope from 1198, first sent preachers, many of them Cistercian monks, to win the Cathars back, with little success. He pressed King Philip II of France to act, but Philip was busy fighting King John of England. Count Raymond VI of Toulouse, sympathetic to the Cathars though not one himself, was excommunicated in 1207. In January 1208 the papal legate Pierre de Castelnau was murdered after a stormy meeting with Raymond, allegedly by one of the count's knights. Innocent blamed Raymond and proclaimed a crusade, offering heretics' lands to those who fought.

By mid-1209 perhaps 20,000 to 30,000 crusaders had gathered under the papal legate Arnaud Amalric. Raymond hastily submitted and joined the crusade, so the army turned on the lands of his nephew Raymond Roger Trencavel. On 22 July 1209 Béziers fell and its inhabitants were massacred; the legates told the pope that almost 20,000 had died, a figure historians consider too high. It was later claimed that Amalric, asked how to tell Cathars from Catholics, replied "Kill them all! God will know his own", though historians doubt he said it. Carcassonne surrendered on 15 August, its people expelled. Simon de Montfort then took command; at Minerve in 1210 some 140 Cathar perfects who refused to recant were burned. Peter II of Aragon, Raymond's brother-in-law, intervened on behalf of Toulouse, but on 12 September 1213 he was killed and his army defeated at Muret. After Philip II's victory at Bouvines in 1214 strengthened the crusaders further, Simon entered Toulouse in 1215, and the Fourth Lateran Council recognised him as count.

The tide then turned. Raymond VI and his son Raymond VII returned in 1216, and Raymond retook Toulouse in 1217. Simon died besieging the city in 1218, struck by a stone from a siege engine. An expedition led by the French heir, Prince Louis, failed to take Toulouse in 1219, and by 1222 Raymond VII had recovered nearly all of his family's lands.

Now king as Louis VIII, Louis led a large royal army south in 1226; most towns submitted without resistance. After his death, royal forces ravaged the land around Toulouse. By the Treaty of Paris, signed in April 1229, Raymond VII kept Toulouse but agreed to fight heresy, and his daughter Joan was married to the king's brother Alphonse, with the county eventually to pass to the crown. It was annexed to the Kingdom of France in 1271.

From 1234 the Inquisition pursued surviving Cathars, while Dominican friars preached against heresy. Most received lighter penalties, but the unrepentant were burned. In 1244 the fortress of Montségur fell and more than 200 perfects died on a pyre. By 1350 the movement had disappeared. The crusade strengthened the French monarchy and hastened the decline of the south's troubadour culture.

Our 1200 map shows the County of Toulouse beside the Kingdom of France and Aragon on the eve of the crusade; by the 1279 map the region is part of France.