if you were a woman in the Languedoc of 1200, it made more sense to be a Cathar than a Catholic.

While the Inquisition was doing its inexorable work, there was still one Cathar castle attempting to hold out against all the odds. The eleventh-century castle of Quéribus sat on a rocky outcrop high in the Corbières. Like Montségur, its remoteness and the difficulty of the terrain protected it from the attentions of northern forces. The castle had

Cathars regarded women as the equal of men, and Catharism offered women the chance to participate fully…

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Matters deteriorated during the last two decades of the thirteenth century, with complaints against the Inquisitors rising. The Inquisition hit back, accusing royal officials of complicity with heretics: in the 50 years before 1275, there were only two such complaints, but between 1275 and 1306 there were thirty.82 Things were further complicated b

The Albigensian Crusade further suffered under Innocent’s successor, Honorius III (1216–27), who had another Crusade to deal with, the official Fifth, which began in the first year of his pontificate. While he saw the need to continue the fight against heresy, he did not put all his faith in crusading. He gave his blessing to Dominic Guzman’s Order

Innocent had long wanted the French crown to intervene in the south, but it was not until 1215 that Philip Augustus’s son, Louis, finally launched an expedition of his own. Nothing much came of it. In 1219, he tried again, this time getting as far as committing wholesale slaughter at the small market town of Marmande, where all 7,000 inhabitants we

in the village of St Félix de Caraman in the Lauragais, south of Toulouse. The gathering of Cathars there in 1167 was ‘the most imposing gathering ever recorded in the history of the Cathars.’49 It was nothing less than an international symposium of Cathars from all over Europe, including – crucially – a delegation from eastern Europe.

In Italy, as elsewhere in Europe, anticlericalism was rife. Arnold of Brescia’s campaigns against the pope only ended with Arnold’s execution in 1155, but stability did not return to the Italian peninsula. The papacy remained locked in conflict with the Holy Roman Emperor, the formidable Frederick Barbarossa, and a series of imperially sponsored an

Italian Catharism entered the thirteenth century as a fractured church, with Concorezzo and Desenzano being respectively the bastions of the moderate and absolute schools. The ordo of other churches, such as those at Florence and the Val del Spoleto, remains unknown. Like the Languedoc, the political situation helped nurture the growth of Catharism