Read God's Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World for Free Online

creation. In one form or another this outlook is among the oldest and most durable heresies in Christendom, arising as it does from a conundrum central to any belief system that posits a beneficent deity. Earthquake, famine, tsunami, disease—headlines daily nurture the dualist in every heart. Augustine, a Church father in the waning days of Rome, had spent the first part of his life as a dualist and the second part making up for the first. Manicheans, Gnostics, Paulicians, Bogomils—dualistic thinking unites them all.
    Very little survives of Cathar thinking from Cathar pens—their documents were systematically destroyed by their enemies. But like other dualists, the Cathars believed that the earthly world had been brought to life by the forces of darkness, and that only the world of the spirit was reliably pure.(Their name may come from the Greek
cathari,
meaning “pure ones,” though another derivation, put about by foes, involves the Latin
cattus,
for “cat,” whose hind parts the Cathars were alleged to kiss.)The most zealous adherents, who had received a sacrament called the
consolamentum,
and were known as
perfecti
or
parfaits,
were ascetic vegetarians who abstained from sexual relations. Ordinary Cathars, known as
credentes,
or “believers,” could live their lives as other people did, saving the
consolamentum
for the deathbed. The Cathars saw licentious and authoritarian local priests as hypocrites; they regarded the Catholic Church as the Great Beast, the Whore of Babylon.
    The Church, of course, was the other system involved in this clash of belief. It is far more of a global institution today than it was in the thirteenth century, when the sway of the “universal” Church was confined to Western Europe. It was hemmed in by the sea to the north and west, by Islam to the south, and by Orthodox Christianity to the east. Catharism, also known as the Albigensian heresy (the name comes from the town of Albi, where many heretics could be found), posed a grave internal threat, and indeed represented one of the most serious threats of any kind since the days of persecution by the pagan emperors of Rome. A succession of popes, beginning in the late twelfth century, had determined to root it out. They tried persuasion, sending priests among the heretics to gather the wayward sheep. When that failed, they took up arms—but even brute force had its limitations. Ultimately, the Cathar heresy led the Church to establish a regime of interrogation and punishment that would come to be known as the Inquisition.
    This was a clash in which the contending parties, heretic and orthodox, shared certain mental underpinnings. They believed without question in the reality of their God. They believed in sin, believed in hell, believed in redemption. And with God on one’s side, there was no basis for compromise.
    Montségur saw little compromise. In the spring of 1243, several hundred Cathars
—perfecti
and ordinary believers—took refuge in the fortress, which had been a stronghold since Roman times and probably much earlier. The name Montségur means “safe mountain.” The Cathars had been routed from one place after another, and chose the summit for a last stand. The forces of the Church, in the form of an army provided by the king of France, who had his own motives for intervening, put the fortress under siege. For ten months, the Cathars held out, a community of armed men and their families in this Masada of heretics, a dense village of huts clustered tightly against the ramparts. They were sustained by rumors that the Holy Roman Emperor, the pope’s bitter enemy, would come to the rescue. He never did.
    The hopelessness of their situation became plain only after the king’s forces scaled a bluff and erected catapults. Spend some time exploring the mountainside, and you may come across rounded stone projectiles the size of cannonballs in the woods. During the last days, it is said, some of the defenders slipped away