The first two possibilities, Catholic and Gnostic/Cathar, are both based on unprovable articles of faith and therefore are equally likely – or unlikely – to be true.
Though its defenders claim otherwise, there is no superior logic whatsoever in the Catholic position. It is, after all, no more logical or inherently more probable to insist that Christ was the Son of God in human flesh born of a virgin than to insist that he took form only as a very convincing apparition.
The third possibility – that the whole story was made up – has much to recommend it. The prime issue is the remarkable absence of solid and convincing historical evidence to confirm that the figure known to the world as Jesus Christ ever actually existed. He might have; it can't be ruled out. But it's equally possible that there never was any such being – whether man or apparition. His obvious resemblance to several other much older ‘dying and resurrecting god-men’ – notably Osiris in Egypt and Dionysos in Greece – has not gone unnoticed by scholars, and the possibility must be confronted that ‘Jesus Christ’ was a myth, not a man. Since no part of the canonical Gospels is thought to date earlier than about AD 60, and some parts may be as late as AD 110, it is within the bounds of reason that everything we know about Christ's person, words and deeds was simply invented some time during the first century AD and then passed into the oral tradition in the form of ‘eyewitness accounts’ of events that had supposedly taken place a couple of generations previously. Extensive editing in the late second century AD began to standardise the oral traditions into the beginnings of the canonical New Testament. By then, needless to say, there was no one left alive who could claim to have witnessed, or to have known anyone who had witnessed, or even to have known anyone who had known anyone who had witnessed, the events surrounding Christ's life and death.
Somehow this secret religion went on
In the early years, along with many smaller factions, we've seen that two main competing forms of Christianity evolved, approximately in parallel, and that there is no clear evidence of which came first. Both claimed primacy and sought to reinforce their position with their own selections from the whole stock of oral and written traditions available in that period. The literalist form, which was to become Catholicism, gained the upper hand – and the ear of Constantine. Gnosticism, the interpretive and revelatory form of Christianity, lost out, was declared a heresy and persecuted.
We make no claim ourselves as to which form was the oldest or most ‘authentic.’ The issue is strictly-speaking irrelevant to the hypothesis we're developing here. Our point is simply that until literalist Catholicism began its sustained campaign to wipe out interpretive Gnosticism, Christianity had been diverse enough to accommodate both simultaneously. The persecutions of the Gnostics were so successful that by the end of the sixth century it seemed that only the literalist form had survived. However the fact that a strong Christian Gnostic religion emerged again in the 10th century in the form of Bogomilism makes it impossible for us to accept that the destruction of Christian Gnosticism in the sixth century was as final as it looked. Somehow this secret religion went on – either through the Manicheans, the Messalians and the Paulicians – or by another less obvious route.
This is why the ‘Organisation’ spoken of so cryptically in the Nag Hammadi scriptures continues to intrigue us. In Chapter Five we saw that the references made to it seem to hint at the existence of a secret society charged with a mission to protect, restore and repromulgate Gnosticism after times of trouble.
It would all sound like so much ancient wishful thinking were it not for the fact that this was more or less what happened at the end of the first millennium. The sudden appearance of Bogomilism in Bulgaria during the last decades of the 10th century was not some isolated heresy. It marked the first step in the repromulgation and resurgence of a fully-fledged Christian-Gnostic religion after 400 years absent from the scene. The next step was its rapid westwards expansion as Catharism during the 12th century. By the beginning of the 13th century it had become a genuinely pan-European faith and the only serious rival that the established Church had faced for a thousand years.
We know that the Church did not identify it as a new rival, but as an old and dangerous one seemingly returned from the dead. Perhaps this sense on the Church's part, of being drawn back into an ancient conflict, one that struck at the very heart of all its shaky claims to legitimacy and authenticity as the true faith, explains the terrible events that followed.
Christ and Antichrist
All wars are terrible – no matter in what epoch they are fought, or with what weapons. Medieval wars were particularly ghastly. But the wars of the Catholic Church against the heresy of Catharism in the 13th century, the so-called Albigensian Crusades, must rank high on the list of the most repulsive, brutal and merciless conflicts that human beings have ever had the misfortune to be involved in.
The Cathars are innocent in these matters, by any sane standards of justice. All they did was reject the authority of the pope and give their loyalty to another religion that sought to correct what it saw as the false doctrines of Catholicism. The rational modern mind cannot blame them for acting independently in this way, let alone detect any reason why their beliefs and behaviour should have merited so gruesome a punishment as burning at the stake. We know that the past is another country – where people do things differently. We understand that the medieval world, full of superstition and the fear of damnation (a fear fostered by the Catholic Church and used as a weapon of mind-control) was not governed by the same codes of interpersonal decency that we try to live by today. Yet the savage persecution of the Cathars, carried out in the name of the Church, and frequently on the direct orders of its bishops, went so far beyond what was normal – even for that bloodstained period – that it has to raise disturbing questions about the beliefs of the perpetrators.
Because our primary focus in this book is on the long-term survival of a secret religion, irrespective of its ‘authenticity’, we will not pursue such questions further here – notably the vexed issue of whether Catholic or Cathar teachings represent ‘authentic’ Christianity. Nonetheless it seems patently obvious to us that the spirit of the gentle and loving Jesus who pervades the New Testament did not ride with the Catholic clergy and knights who ravaged the once free land of Occitania in the first half of the 13th century. A chronicler of the time, one of the two authors of the epic Chanson de la Croisade albigeoise (‘Song of the Albigensian Crusade’), summed the problem up in an ironic unofficial epitaph for Simon de Montfort, the fearsome general who led the Catholic armies in Occitania for almost a decade of unremitting slaughter before being killed in battle in 1218. He was buried with much pomp and ceremony at Carcassonne where, the Chanson reports: Those who can read may learn from his epitaph that he is a saint and a martyr; that he is bound to rise again to share the heritage, to flourish in that state of unparalleled felicity, to wear a crown and have his place in the Kingdom. But for my part I have heard tell that the matter must stand thus: if one may seek Christ Jesus in this world by killing men and shedding blood; by the destruction of human souls; by compounding murder and hearkening to perverse council; by setting the torch to great fires; by winning lands through violence, and working for the triumphs of vain pride; by fostering evil and snuffing out good; by slaughtering women and slitting children's throats – why, then, he must needs wear a crown, and shine resplendent in Heaven.19
In other words, unless the lessons of humility, nonviolence, forgiveness and unconditional love so plain to read in the New Testament have somehow been turned upside down, inside out and back to front, there is no way that anyone seeking Christ in this world is going to find him by following Simon de Montfort's route. And if that is the case, since we're in a position today to stand back from the propaganda and prejudices of the time, doesn't it suggest that the entire Catholic onslaught against the Cathars was fundamentally unchristian?
Or even, as the Cathars themselves suggested, ‘anti-Christian’?
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‘More evil than Saracens …’
We've already filled in the background to the Albigensian Crusades in earlier chapters. The tremendous success of the Cathar heresy in Occitania and other parts of Europe during the 12th century had for many years been watched with envy and growing alarm by the Catholic hierarchy in Rome. By the early 13th century it is estimated that more than half the Occitanian population had abandoned the Church and that growing numbers were looking exclusively to Catharism to meet their spiritual needs. Worse still, as we saw in Chapter Two, the local nobility gave tacit and sometimes even overt support to the Cathars, frequently had relatives amongst them, sided with them in disputes with the bishops, and were closely linked to some of the leading perfecti. Once it had become clear that the Cathar religion was not a flash in the pan, but quite possibly formed part of a great coordinated plot against the Church, it was obvious that sooner or later one pope or another was going to have to do something about it. The only question was what exactly, and when?
That the ‘what’ should be the terror weapon of a crusade had probably been decided by Pope Innocent III some years before the perfect excuse to use such a weapon of terror presented itself.20 But when that happened he acted immediately.
The precipitating incident was the assassination of the papal legate to Occitania, one Peter de Castelnau, in January 1208. A former monk of the Cistercian Abbey of Fontfroide, de Castelnau was in Occitania on Innocent's orders accompanied by another leading Cistercian, Arnaud Amalric, the abbot of Cîteaux.21 In 1207 they stirred up deep-seated resentments when they tried to form a league of southern barons to hunt down the Cathars. Raymond VI, the powerful Count of Toulouse refused to join and was excommunicated by de Castelnau. The excommunication was withdrawn in January 1208 after Raymond had been forced to apologise personally to the papal legate – a shameful climb-down for such a highly-placed nobleman. The very next morning one of Raymond's knights, perhaps seeking to avenge the humiliation of his master, rode up to de Castelnau as he prepared to ford the River Rhone and ran him through with a spear. He died on the spot.22
Two months later, on 10 March 1208, Innocent declared the Crusade – the first time ever that the term ‘crusade’ was used for a war against fellow Christians. Like the Christian emperors of Rome long before, he clearly gave the highest priority to the extirpation of heresy – higher even than to the wars to regain the Holy Land. He wrote: Attack the followers of heresy more fearlessly even than the Saracens – since they are more evil – with a strong hand and an outstretched arm. Forward then soldiers of Christ! Forward brave recruits to the Christian army! Let pious zeal inspire you to avenge this monstrous crime against your God.23
Meanwhile Arnaud Amalric, abbot of Cîteaux, had been sent to northern France to rally support amongst the nobles there. ‘May the man who abstains from this Crusade,’ he is quoted as saying, ‘never drink wine again; may he never eat, morning or evening, off a good linen cloth, or dress in fine stuff again to the end of his days; and at his death may he be buried like a dog.’24
But such browbeating was hardly needed to mobilise the rednecks at the court of the king of France. They were raring to go anyway. Here was an opportunity to acquire wealth and status with an adventure relatively near to home and to earn papal indulgences and forgiveness of sins that would normally have required much harder work in the Holy Land. Along with dozens of B-list aristocrats like Simon de Montfort who were looking to get rich quick, thousands of volunteers at the foot-soldier level also poured in from all walks of life. The lowliest man could benefit since crusading meant the automatic postponement of all his debts and the release of his property from the hold of creditors for the duration of his service. 25
Still the preparations took more than a year. By February 1209 military detachments for the Crusade were reported to be massing all over northern France.26 But it was not until St. John's Day, 24 June 1209, that the full force, estimated to number 20,000 men, had assembled at the French city of Lyons ready for the march south. Simon de Montfort was with it but not yet its general. For this first campaign the terrifying Christian horde was headed by Arnaud Amalric himself.27 It need not be imagined that being a Cistercian abbot, supposedly dedicated to a lifetime of Christian peace and charity, would inhibit him in any way on the battlefield. Far from it. At Béziers, the first Cathar city that he attacked, Arnaud Amalric was about to order an infamous atrocity …
Hell's Army
Conditioned by television images of modern warfare with smart bombs and other high-tech weaponry it is difficult to imagine the atmosphere of primal harm and menace that must have radiated like heat off the big medieval army that marched out of Lyons on 24 June 1209.
Its iron fist, mounted, armoured from head to foot and heavily-armed, was an elite fighting force of trained killers. These were the knights – the samurai class of old Europe. Gathered from the aristocracy, they were men who had been groomed for warfare since childhood. They probably totalled no more than 1,000 individuals, but each of them, depending on his resources, was supported in battle by anything from four to thirty hand-picked cavalry and infantry who fought at his side as a skilled and disciplined unit.28
Lower down the social ladder the theme of discipline in the crusading army was continued amongst divisions of professional soldiers specialised in particular military arts. They included the gunners who operated the great war-catapults and stone-guns – the trebuchets and mangonels that had a range of almost half a kilometer and could hurl projectiles weighing 40 kilograms. There were teams of battering-ram specialists who would breach the city-gates, while other teams assembled and operated huge siege towers from which archers could fire down on the defendants inside the walls. Sappers and siege engineers were also needed for the business of filling in moats and undermining foundations .29
Less disciplined but equally deadly, and in a way far more frightening, were the mercenaries, known as routiers, who had been hired for their unprincipled ferocity. These were times of widespread poverty and frequent famines in Europe, and droves of the landless, the unemployed and the dispossessed wandered the countryside. The most efficient and ruthless amongst them formed up into lawless bands, looting and killing to support themselves, and were hired en masse by the Christian army that the pope had unleashed on Occitania.30 ‘They were,’ notes Zoé Oldenbourg: … desperate fellows with nothing to lose, and therefore would plunge on through thick and thin regardless … They formed a series of shock battalions, all the easier to utilise since no one had the slightest qualms about sacrificing them. The most important thing … was the terror they inspired in the civilian population … Not content with mere pillage and rape they indulged in massacre and torture for the sheer fun of the thing, roasting children over slow fires and chopping men into small pieces.31
Even lower down the pecking-order than the feared routiers were the ribauds, the unpaid camp followers, numbering several thousands in their own right, who had attached themselves unofficially to the Crusade. They too were desperate people – a ragged bunch of bare-arsed muggers, rapists and corpse looters. But weirdly they elected their own ‘king’ on the campaign who divided the chores and the spoils of war amongst the rest.32
Last but not least there were the holy rollers – wild, itinerant Christian preachers and groups of their fanatical followers armed with crude weapons like scythes and clubs who hoped to gain a special dispensation in heaven by murdering any Cathars that the main army missed.33
It seems richly ironic that the self-proclaimed Catholic Church of so peaceful and loving a figure as Jesus Christ was not only prepared to raise an army to massacre those who disagreed with it, but also to pack its ranks with the most notorious murderers and brigands of the age. But if we look at the whole affair from the Cathar perspective the sense of disconnect goes away. It is not, as its later apologists would claim, that the church of a good and loving God was somehow (aberrantly, temporarily) provoked into extreme violence by extreme circumstances. I
n the Cathar take on this, the Catholic Church served the God of Evil; accordingly it was behaving entirely in character when it recruited an army of demons.
Now formed up behind Arnaud Amalric into a vast column of men and supplies more than 4 miles in length, this demonic force – or army of valiant crusaders depending on one's point of view – bristled with axes and pikes and seethed with the intent to do violence.
‘Kill them all’: the Feast of Saint Mary Magdalene and the workings of divine vengeance …
After taking a meandering course through Occitania, pausing only to accept the surrender of settlements unable to defend themselves and to burn small groups of Cathars along the way, Arnaud Amalric and his 20,000 hooligans fetched up in front of the prosperous city of Béziers on 21 July 1209. Its walls were very thick, very high and very well defended and everyone assumed that this was going to be a long siege.
Some curiosities now coincide.