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now known as the Languedoc was not officially a part of France. It was an independent principality, whose language, culture and political institutions had less in common with the north than they had with Spain with the kingdoms of
    Leon, Aragon and Castile. The principality was ruled by a handful of noble families, chief of whom were the counts of Toulouse and the powerful house of Trencavel. And within the confines of this principality, there flourished a culture which, at the time, was the most advanced and sophisticated in Christendom, with the possible exception of Byzantium.
    The Languedoc had much in common with Byzantium. Learning, for example, was highly esteemed, as it was not in Northern Europe. Philosophy and other intellectual activities flourished; poetry and courtly love were extolled;
    Greek, Arabic; and Hebrew were enthusiastically studied; and at Lunel and
    Narbonne, schools devoted to the Cabala the ancient esoteric tradition of
    Judaism -were thriving. Even the nobility was literate and literary, at a time when most Northern nobles could not even sign their names.
    Like Byzantium, too, the Languedoc practised a civilised, easy-going religious tolerance in contrast to the fanatical zeal that
    characterised other parts of Europe. Skeins of Islamic and Judaic thought, for instance, were imported through maritime commercial centres like Marseilles, or made their way across the Pyrenees from Spain. At the same time, the Roman
    Church enjoyed no very high esteem; Roman clerics in the Languedoc, by virtue of their notorious corruption, succeeded primarily in alienating the populace. There were churches, for example, in which no mass had been said for more than thirty years. Many priests ignored their parishioners and ran businesses or large estates. One archbishop of Narbonne never even visited his diocese.
    Whatever the corruption of the church, the Languedoc had reached an apex of culture that would not be seen in Europe again until the

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    Renaissance. But, as in Byzantium, there were elements of
    complacency, decadence and tragic weakness which rendered the region unprepared for the onslaught subsequently unleashed upon it. For some time both the Northern European nobility and the Roman Church had been aware of its vulnerability, and were eager to exploit it. The Northern nobility had for many years coveted the wealth and luxury of the
    Languedoc. And the Church was interested for its own reasons. In the first place its authority in the region was slack. And while culture flourished in the Languedoc, something else flourished as well the major heresy of medieval Christendom.
    In the words of Church authorities the Languedoc was “infected’ by the
    Albigensian heresy, ‘the foul leprosy of the South’. And although the adherents of this heresy were essentially non-violent, they constituted a severe threat to Roman authority, the most severe threat, indeed, that Rome would experience until three centuries later when teachings of Martin
    Luther began the Reformation. By 1200 there was a very real prospect of this heresy displacing Roman Catholicism as the dominant form of Christianity in the Languedoc. And what was more ominous still in the
    Church’s eyes, it was already radiating out to other parts of Europe, especially to urban centres in Germany, Flanders and Champagne.
    The heretics were known by a variety of names. In 1165 they had been condemned by an ecclesiastical council at the Languedoc town of Albi.
    For this reason, or perhaps because Albi continued to be one of their centres, they were often called Albigensians. On other occasions they were called
    Cathars or Cathares or Cathari. In Italy they were called Patarines. Not infrequently they were also branded or stigmatised with the names of much earlier heresies Arian, Marcionite and Manichaean. “Albigensian’ and “Cathar’ were essentially generic names.
    In other words they did not refer to a single coherent church, like that of