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Doinel himself wrote prolifically on
    Cathar thought, and by 1896 had become a prominent member of a local cultural organisation, the Society of Arts and Sciences of Carcassonne.

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    In 1898 he was elected its 41 secretary. This society included a number of Sauniere’s associates, among them his best friend, the Abbe Henri Boudet.
    And Doinel’s own personal circle included Emma Calve.
    It is therefore very probable that Doinel and
    Sauniere were acquainted.
    There is a further, and more provocative, reason for linking the Cathars with the mystery of Rennes-leChateau. In one of the parchments found by
    Sauniere, the text is sprinkled with a handful of small letters eight, to be precise quite deliberately different from all the others. Three of the letters are towards the top of the page, five towards the bottom. These eight letters have only to be read in sequence for them to spell out two words “REX 1vtuNDt’. This is unmistakably a Cathar term, which is immediately recognisable to anyone familiar with Cathar thought.
    Given these factors, it seemed reasonable enough to commence our investigation with the Cathars. We therefore began to research into them, their beliefs and traditions, their history and milieu in detail. Our inquiry opened new dimensions of mystery, and generated a number of tantalising questions.
    The Albigensian Crusade
    In 1209 an army of some 30,000 knights and foot-soldiers from Northern Europe descended like a whirlwind on the Languedoc the mountainous north-eastern foothills of the Pyrenees in what is now southern France. In the ensuing war the whole territory was ravaged, crops were destroyed, towns and cities were razed, a whole population was put to the sword. This extermination occurred on so vast, so terrible a scale that it may well constitute the first case of “genocide’ in modern European history. In the town of Beziers alone, for example, at least 15,000 men, women and children were slaughtered wholesale many of them in the sanctuary of the church itself. When an officer inquired of the pope’s representative how he might distinguish heretics from true believers, the reply was, “Kill them all. God will recognise His own.”
    This quotation, though widely reported, may be apocryphal Nevertheless,

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    it typifies the fanatical zeal and bloodlust with which the atrocities were perpetrated. The Map 3 The Languedoc of the Cathars
    BORDEAUX
    R C- fm
    CA HORS
    AGE ~f /”
    MOISSAC MONTAUBANAVIGNON
    ALBI -NIMES
    TOUL USE CA EMONTPELLIER
    ~MU0.ET
    MI NERVE BE:2I
    CARCASSONNE “MARSEILLES
    PAMI~”RS.X . MOT _A0.BONNE~
    MIR~”PO X LET
    IX TERM LA VELA NET
    rMCNTStGURi-QU IBP us _
    ^^~”RPIGNAN
    same papal representative, writing to Innocent III in Rome, announced proudly that
    “neither age nor sex nor status was spared’.
    After Beziers, the invading army swept through the whole of the Languedoc.
    Perpignan fell, Narbonne fell, Carcassonne fell, Toulouse fell. And, wherever the victors passed, they left a trail of blood, death and carnage in their wake.
    This war, which lasted for nearly forty years, is now known as the Albigensian Crusade. It was a crusade in the true sense of the word. It had been called by the pope himself. Its participants wore a cross on their tunics, like crusaders in Palestine. And the rewards were the same as they were for crusaders in the Holy Land remission of all sins, an expiation of penances, an assured place in Heaven and all the booty one could plunder. In this Crusade, moreover, one did not even have to cross the sea.
    And in accordance with feudal law, one was obliged to fight for no more than forty days assuming, of course, that one had no interest in plunder.

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    By the time the Crusade was over, the Languedoc had been utterly transformed, plunged back into the barbarity that characterised the rest of
    Europe. Why? For what had all this havoc, brutality and devastation occurred?
    At the beginning of the thirteenth century the area