Modelling themselves on Christ and the Apostles, Bogomil leaders had 12 disciples and lived lives of simplicity and poverty, in reaction to what they saw as the irredeemable corruption and false teachings of the Church.

The Inquisition was based on procedures drawn up under Innocent to tackle wayward priests which gave Inquisitors – usually Dominican friars – the powers of arrest and trial. What started as a method for keeping the clergy in line was to become ‘one of the most effective means of thought control that Europe has ever known.’

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

Amongst the Bogomils whose names have survived are Jeremiah (thought by some to be the pseudonym of Bogomil himself), who wrote the widely circulated tract The Legend of the Cross,

Once the Church had become aware of the Cathars, they also noted two things: that Catharism was already a fully fledged church that had suddenly emerged, as if from nowhere, and that the Cathars – along with fellow-travellers such as the Publicans and the Waldensians – seemed to be everywhere at once, undermining the foundations of Church and

The news of the atrocity at Béziers spread like wildfire. The Crusaders marched on Narbonne, which, fearing a similar fate, surrendered at the first sight of the Crusade. Carcasonne was next, and Raymond Roger Trencavel knew it. He implemented a scorched-earth policy around the city to make the land as inhospitable as possible for the Crusaders,

The Languedoc in the year 1200 was a society in remarkable flower. It was one of the most cosmopolitan and sophisticated areas of Europe: trade flourished in the great towns of Toulouse and Carcasonne, with Toulouse itself being only outclassed by Rome and Venice in terms of size and cultural life. The arts were enjoying a renascence, with the

Manichaeism might have been extinguished from Europe, but the name lived on as a byword for dualist, heretic or merely a political opponent. (Indeed, the word ‘maniac’ derives from a derogatory term for Manichaean.)

At the turn of the first millennium, a peasant called Leutard in the village of Vertus, near Châlons-sur-Marne in the north-east of France, had a dream. In it, a swarm of bees attacked his private parts, and then entered his body – presumably through his urethra. The dream, rather than making Leutard wake up half the village with his screaming,