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

with a considerable treasure, to sustain Cathar activities elsewhere. If they did, the treasure has never been found, though the romantic quest continues to animate casual enthusiasts and the occasional novelist. (Inevitably, Nazis figure in the stories.)
    Some intimate details are known of life at Montségur as the end approached, because priests of the Inquisition questioned the survivors at length and then wrote everything down. The inquisitors were mainly interested in heresy, and in rolling up Cathar networks farther afield, not in writing an enduring work of social history. Even so, a gripping picture emerges. The Church authorities offered lenient terms to those who would abjure their beliefs. The Cathar
perfecti
refused to do so: as they saw it, the salvation of their souls was at stake. On condition that their followers be spared, the
perfecti
and those closest to them agreed to surrender themselves to execution after a two-week truce. They spent the two weeks in prayer and fasting, and gave away their meager possessions. Specific moments, recorded by the inquisitors, are haunting in their banality. One
perfectus
made a gift to a friend of oil, salt, pepper, wax, and some green cloth.When the truce was over, the Cathars climbed down from the fortress to a slanting field on the slopes. Many had newly accepted the
consolamentum.
More than two hundred people were burned on the spot, mounting ladders to share a single pyre. As the fires smoldered, a message was sent to the pope: “We have crushed the head of the dragon.”
    A stone marker indicates where the pyre stood. For more than three quarters of a millennium the field has been known in Occitan, the local language, as the
prat dels crematz
—the “field of the burned.”
     
    “Let God Sort Them Out”
     
    Travel around Languedoc and the Pyrenees today, and you might think the Cathars had actually won. As in any self-respecting region of Europe, there is a secessionist movement afoot, though its gains are cultural (and gastronomic) rather than political. The flag of Languedoc—the cross of Toulouse, in gold, against a red background—flies everywhere, and the better bookstores display a prominent selection of works relating somehow to the Cathars (and including
The Da Vinci Code
). The Cathar moment in local history has echoes of Camelot and Brigadoon, with a dash of Thermopylae and the Alamo. On the roadways, tasteful signs in brown announce that you are entering Pays Cathare—“Cathar Country”—and hikers can tramp along a rugged 150-mile Cathar Trail. Occitan, closely related to neighboring Catalan, was the language of the troubadors and of courtly love. The name Occitan, like the name Languedoc, derives from
oc,
the Occitan word for “yes.” The language is now enjoying a mild resurgence: street names in the region are sometimes given in French and Occitan, and activists are busily inventing homegrown Occitan terminology for the twenty-first century—
Oeb
site instead of Web site, for instance. Toulouse, the high-tech capital of France and the headquarters of Airbus, uses both Occitan and French recorded messages in its metro system. In gift shops, the Cathar religion is presented as a form of New Age spirituality against a sound track of mournful wind instruments.
    The sheer brutality of the Cathar suppression can be hard to summon. The Albigensian Crusade was launched by Pope Innocent III in 1208. Innocent was perhaps the most strong-willed and powerful pope of the Middle Ages, claiming for the holder of his office a status “lower than God but higher than man.”He was not a sentimentalist or a happy warrior: his chief surviving work is a glum, or perhaps realistic, treatise titled
On the Misery of the Human Condition.
Innocent greatly strengthened the papal administration and asserted the supremacy of the pope above secular rulers, at one point excommunicating King John of England and placing the entire country under interdict. He also