Albigenses
A branch of the Cathari (a dualistic, purist sect) who were dominant in southern France from the XII-XIV Centuries, the Albigenses believed that two supreme beings had charge of the world. One was a good God, Christ, and the other was an evil god. Because they believed that the flesh is evil, they led austere lives that aimed at salvation through transcendence of bodily needs. All were to abstain from consuming animal products and from marriage. In practice, the leaders, the Perfect, were strictly abstimeous, and the Believers were less so, although they would eventually have to live as purely as the Perfect.
Because of their Manichæan rejection of the body, Albigeneses rejected the Roman Catholic church's teachings about the Bible and the life of Jesus Christ as literal. Jesus did not, say the Albigenses, suffer in the flesh: he was an angel with a phantom body, and all his sufferings were allegorical. The Albigenses also believed that man did not need the church as an intermediary between himself and God. Irregularities among the Roman clergy fostered the spread of Albigensian doctrine.
In the XII Century, the Albigenses presented their own Bible, which included both the Old and New Testaments, and set up their own church structure in a federation of communities. A Roman council, which Lucius III convoked in Verona in 1184, condemned the heresy and resolved to set up an inquistion to exterminate it. Innocent III hoped to convert the Albigenses and established preaching orders, like the Dominicans, to bring the errant back.
The 1208 murder of Peter of Castelnau, a papal representative in Albigensian territory, changed Innocent's focus from words to weapons. He asked Simon de Montfort to lead an armed crusade. Massacres and bloody battles ensued. The crusade, which was not entirely successful, was stopped in 1213, after the battle of Muret at which Montfort defeated Peter of Aragon. From 1219 until 1229, fighting continued, but the reason for the battles was French territorial expansion into Languedoc.
Gregory IX instituted an inquistion against the Albigenses in 1233. By 1300, the Albigenses were vanquished.
The once territorially-based appellation has become synonymous with heretics.
Karen Rae Keck
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