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launched an ill-fated crusade to recover Jerusalem from the Muslims.
    The crusade against the Cathars went better. The proximate cause was the murder of a papal legate, Pierre de Castelnau, perhaps on the orders of Count Raymond of Toulouse, long known as sympathetic to the heretics. Raymond was an indifferent warrior but a nimble diplomat who shuttled between excommunication and a state of grace throughout his life. To save his skin he would change sides and lead a campaign against the Cathars—and then change sides again.
    Heretical movements within Christendom had been emerging with new virulence for half a century or more, and in southern France and northern Italy groups like the Cathars and Waldensians enjoyed growing popular support, along with the quiet or open protection of the local nobility. The Church attempted to cope with the situation by preaching intensively in the affected areas. It was a tough sell. In 1178, a papal legate in Toulouse reported that a large crowd had taunted him and made obscene gestures:
“Digit demonstrarent
,” he complained—“They gave the finger.”Several years later, Pope Lucius III issued the decree
Ad abolendam
(“For the purpose of abolishing . . .”), which provided a taxonomy of heretical sects and, to close the tautological circle, made it clear that refusing to submit to papal authority was itself a form of heresy.
    The Albigensian Crusade set out to crush the Cathars, and up to a point it succeeded. The pope’s own legions were mainly angelic, but he harnessed the forces of local magnates (who saw which way the wind was blowing) and then of the kings of France (who saw an opportunity to extend their control over the south). The crusade was waged over twenty years, punctuated regularly by wholesale massacres. “Forward, then, most valiant soldiers of Christ!” a papal legate urged the warriors at the outset. “Go to meet the forerunners of Antichrist and strike down the ministers of the Old Serpent!”
    Modernity, as the geographer David Harvey once noted, is not a time—it’s a place.I came across his remark in the twenty-first century, reading a book in the cocoon of an aircraft cruising above the Syrian Desert; pockets of the Middle Ages probably survived only a few miles below. For most people in the developed world, memories of outright religious warfare, once a gruesome fact of life, have long been buried. The past decade, with its ominous references to a “clash of civilizations” between Islam and the West, has revived them. Jihadist violence affords a fresh taste of what religious warfare can be like. In terms of pungency and sensibility, the rhetoric of Islamist groups might have been drawn directly from a thousand years ago. Ayman al-Zawahiri, now the leader of Al Qaeda, sounded not unlike that papal legate when he pronounced an anathema against his enemies in 2009:
     
O Allah, annihilate the Americans and Jews and the hypocrites and apostates who help them. O Allah, take revenge on our behalf from them. O Allah, make their end one of loss and destruction. O Allah, destroy their riches and harden their hearts . . . O Allah, annihilate the secularist politicians of hypocrisy who rush madly to earn the Crusaders’ pleasure . . .
     
    Not surprisingly, apostates and secularists have often risen to the bait. Some have couched their responses in religious terms. President George W. Bush, in a public statement soon after the 9/11 attacks, used the word “crusade” to characterize the task ahead, though he later regretted the terminology.One journalist in Iraq described how, in 2004, members of the 1st Infantry Division painted the words “Jesus Killed Mohammed,” in Arabic, on the front of a Bradley Fighting Vehicle.Another journalist that same year recounted a prayer session held by the American troops of Bravo Company on the eve of the battle of Fallujah:
     
Then a chaplain, Navy Lieutenant Wayne Hall, of Oklahoma City, blessed Bravo: “Today