The Albigensian Crusade

In 1053, Pope Leo IX made an unorthodox decision to personally lead a papal army against Norman forces in southern Italy. The two sides met at the Battle of Civitate where the Norman army decisively defeated the papal forces and subsequently captured the pope. In a letter the next year, Leo IX explained to the Byzantine emperor, Constantine Monomachos, why he felt the need to employ violence despite being a vicar of God on earth. He wrote that the Normans—who were themselves Catholic—embodied “an impiety that was more than pagan” by destroying churches and killing other Christians. Because of these and other transgressions, Leo IX justified his use of violence as a means of saving “Christ’s sheep.” A little over a century and a half later in 1207, Pope Innocent III wrote a letter to the archbishops of southern France lamenting the murder of his legate, Peter of Castelnau, who had been tasked with rooting out the Cathar heresy in the southern French region of Languedoc. Near the end of the letter, Innocent III wrote that all those who took up arms against the Cathars in Languedoc would receive “an indulgence of the remission of sins from God and his vicar.” By doing this, Innocent III started the Albigensian Crusade and initiated one of the most comprehensive cultural cleansings in medieval European

history.

Raphael Lemkin, notable for coining the term “genocide” in his research on Nazi Germany’s efforts to exterminate the Jews, believed the Albigensian Crusade to be “one of the most conclusive cases of Genocide in religious

history.”
Both of these letters and the circumstances surrounding their writing underscore a dramatic transformation, which occurred within the Catholic Church from around the mid-eleventh century to the mid-thirteenth century. At the beginning of said time frame, the structurally fragment church was controlled as much by secular rulers as by the pope, who was mostly confined to Rome and the areas surrounding it. When Innocent III became pope in 1198, the institution had been thoroughly altered by previous reformer popes. Internally, the reform efforts resulted in a more regimented Catholic Church run by a clergy devoted to the Church and the pope. Additionally, the reform movement successfully placed the papacy above secular rulers and reformulated the morality of violence to encourage the use of force in the name of the Church. In general, the reform efforts enabled the papacy to coordinate large-scale undertakings in the name of the Catholic Church. The rise of Catharism, a dualist religious sect, in the mid-twelfth century represented one of the greatest threats to Catholic supremacy in Latin Europe. Over the following centuries, religious and secular authorities fanatically and systematically persecuted this ascetic, anti-ecclesiastical community. Without the accomplishments of reformist popes, particularly Gregory VII and Urban II, Pope Innocent III would have most likely been unable to effectively handle the Cathar heresy. Instead, the suppression of the Cathar heresy in France reveals the resolve of the papacy and the Catholic Church to homogenize Catholicism in the thirteenth century.
Pope Innocent III’s call to crusade in 1207 came about after years of conflict between the papacy and secular authorities. The election of Pope Leo IX in 1049 ushered in this era of reform. By “reform” I adhere to Brett Whalen’s definition of “an historical effort to transform the circumstances of the Roman Church and its place in European society.” In other words, the reform efforts focused on rehabilitating the clergy, including banning simony and clerical marriages, curtailing material excesses, and, in general, elevating the morality of the Church so it could continue leading God’s flock. To realize these goals, reformer popes believed that the Church and the papacy needed to be independent from other sources of authority: specifically, the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry III, who, ironically, nominated the first reformist pope, Leo IX, after a quick succession of papal vacancies.
Conflict between reformist and non-reformist supporters continued over the ensuing decades, both within the Church and between the papacy and the Holy Roman Empire. After one of Leo IX’s successors, Pope Nicholas II, issued the Election Decree of 1059, which explicitly stated that papal elections would be controlled by the cardinal bishops, reformist proponents turned their attention to investiture (the selection of bishops), a duty traditionally shared with secular authorities. Over the following decades, tensions escalated as the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry IV, refused to relinquish his ability to select new bishops. Finally, in 1076, the aggressively reformist pope, Gregory VII, ordered Henry IV step down as emperor and excommunicated him from the church. The next year, Gregory VII released Henry IV from excommunication after the emperor begged for the pope’s forgiveness and acknowledged the pope’s supremacy at Canossa Castle in Italy. The truce proved only temporary: Gregory IV excommunicated Henry IV again in 1080, resulting in the emperor selecting an antipope, Clement III, that same year. Henry IV, at one point begging for mercy, drove Gregory VII out of Rome in 1084. This conflict, known as the Investiture Controversy, would drag on past the two men’s deaths, damaging the reputation of both the papacy and the Holy Roman Empire. Not until the Concordant of Worms in 1022, would a truce between the Holy Roman Empire and the Papacy be reached.
Pope Gregory IV’s immediate successors, Victor III and Urban II, continued the reform efforts despite considerable imperial opposition. Urban II’s papacy established critical precedent that would enable Pope Innocent III to call a crusade many years later. In a council at Clermont in 1095, despite the existence of an antipope, Pope Urban II announced the First Crusade to retake Jerusalem and the Holy Lands from the Turks, or, as Urban called them, “the vile race.” Urban II urged “men of all ranks whatsoever, knights as well as foot-soldiers, rich and poor,” to stop their “private war[s]s against the faithful” and “attain an eternal reward.” Whatever he thought would happen, the holy war proved to be incredibly successful. Around 100,000 Catholics from across Europe traversed thousands of miles to bring about Urban II’s dream. In 1099, after suffering from three years of travail, including defeats, famine, and infighting, the crusaders reached Jerusalem. Within a matter of weeks, the holy warriors breached the walls of Jerusalem. Fulcher of Charter, one of the earliest chroniclers of the First Crusade, wrote that the crusaders did not spare any of the inhabitants, “even those begging for mercy.” With a cathartic release of religious fanaticism, Pope Urban II’s holy army triumphantly concluded the First Crusade.
While the territorial gains from of the First Crusade required constant support from Latin Europe, the holy war permanently and significantly affected religious ideology, especially for those who participated in violent acts such as knights. News of the crusaders’ victory did not reach Rome before Urban II’s death. Nevertheless, Urban II dramatically unified much of Latin Christianity around a common cause and also created a whole new form of warfare. Around the turn of the tenth century, the clergy’s main means of controlling violence centered around the Peace and Truce of God movement, which attempted to force secular leaders to take holy vows of peace. At the council of Clermont in 1095, Pope Urban II stressed the importance of this peace movement among Christians. Yet, more importantly, Urban II’s call to crusade established a way for Christian knights and others to achieve martyrdom through violent means. As a result of the efforts of popes and the clergy over the previous decades to control violence, knights began to consider themselves as soldiers of the church capable of controlling their own salvation. This shift in personal identity, undergirded by a religious logic of justified violence, not only helped make the First Crusade a success but also created a source of Christian warriors eager to follow papal commands and achieve salvation. Pope Innocent III along with the two next popes following him, Honorius III and Gregory IX, relied upon this pool of armed “proselytizers” during the 20-year Albigensian Crusade against the Cathars.
Although the papal developments analyzed so far help explain Pope Innocent III’s ability to call a crusade, that crusade, alone, did not eliminate the Cathar heresy. In fact, the Abligensian Crusade did not fulfill its primary goal of eradicating Catharism because it drove the Cathar church underground rather than out of existence. Another mechanism specifically devised to eradicate heresy operated before, during, and after the Albigensian Crusade. That ecclesiastical mechanism can roughly be described as the systemic persecution of nonconforming Christian sects. The ideological impetus behind this mechanism, like the mechanism of crusade, derived from the papal reform efforts of the mid-eleventh century. As Brett Whalen puts it in his book, The Medieval Papacy, reformist popes believed that sin “jeopardized the efficacy of the sacraments, imperiled ecclesiastical property, and threatened to pollute the faithful.” That is to say, the reformist popes concerned themselves with the entire Catholic Church body, not just its ecclesiastical hierarchy.