The Cathars: The Most Successful Heresy of the Middle Ages

The decisive development that paved the way for the Cathars’ great predecessors, the Bogomils, was the establishment of the first Bulgarian empire (681–1118).

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

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 became a fact of life, ‘an entrenched institution rather than a single, unrepeated ordeal.’81 If people were suspected of giving false or incomplete testimony, they were hauled back in front of the Inquisitors to be reinterrogated, regardless of whether they were high-born or peasant. Faced with such intensive action, most nobility

Gerbert d’Aurillac, the first Frenchman to become pope – he reigned as Sylvester II between 999 and 1003 – made an unusual disposition at Rheims in 991 on the occasion of his consecration as Archbishop. He stated his belief in both the Old and New Testaments, the legitimacy of marriage, eating meat and the existence of an evil spirit that was lesse

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.)

The Cathars, or Good Christians as they called themselves, would certainly have been horrified to learn that they were being referred to in derogatory terms that suggested they were participants in fictitious satanic ceremonies that were the product of rumour and the overactive imaginations of Catholic critics. Although the Church was keen to paint

Cosmas describes the Bogomils as rejecting the Old Testament and Church sacraments; the only prayer they used was the Lord’s Prayer. They did not venerate icons or relics, while the cross was denounced as the instrument of Christ’s torture. The Church itself was seen as being in league with the devil, whom the Bogomils regarded as not only the crea

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,