The Cathars: The Most Successful Heresy of the Middle Ages

The Cathars’ claim to be part of an authentic apostolic tradition dating back to the time of Christ cannot be proved, it can only be inferred. The Catholic Church’s claim to descend from Peter is also historically unverifiable. Something that perhaps finds in the Cathars’ favour is one of the Dead Sea Scrolls, only made public for the first time in

More recently, it has been the subject of Dan Brown’s global bestseller The Da Vinci Code. However, the idea that Jesus married Mary Magdalene does not originate with Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln: one of the Cathars’ inner teachings, which was only passed on to the Perfect, was that the Magdalene was Jesus’s wife.112 This is puzzling, to say the leas

Peyrat’s mythologised, semi-fictional Cathars had a big impact on the likes of the Félibrige, a group of scholars who were keen to preserve works written in Occitan. Underneath this goal lay a separatist movement, who wanted to restore Languedocian independence and identity. Peyrat was regarded as something of a guru, and the group began to produce

The two groups with whom the Cathars are most often associated are the Troubadours and the Knights Templar, both of whom had a very strong presence in the Languedoc during the thirteenth century. The Troubadours were itinerant poets writing in Occitan who flourished between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. In Germany, they had fellow travelle

In their anti-papal stance, the Cathars were forerunners of not just Protestantism but also foreshadowed the French Republic.

One hypothesis holds that the Cathar treasure, which was smuggled out of Montségur shortly before the surrender, was in fact the Grail, which was then either hidden in a nearby cave, or entrusted to the Knights Templar.

The Knights Templar were the most powerful military religious order of their day, and were major landowners in the Languedoc. While theories suggesting that the Cathar treasure – whatever its nature – was entrusted to the Templars remain fanciful, there are a number of more definite links between the heretics and the soldier-monks. One of the Templ

Frederick did little to encourage the persecution of heretics, and the papacy, keen to gain allies in the key cities of Lombardy, did not press the heresy issue. Also, many cities, wishing to maintain their independence, did not enforce anti-heresy legislation, not because they were especially sympathetic to groups such as the Cathars or the Walden

The most important surviving Cathar tract is The Book of the Two Principles, which was written in the 1240s, probably by John of Lugio, a Cathar from the Albanensian95 school, which was part of the absolutist church of Desenzano. It is ‘the most decisive evidence that the Cathars were evolving their own ideas about the nature of Dualism’,96 and wer