A saga of spiritual freedom and religious intolerance, a warning and a lesson from the

past always worth telling, except of course that none of it is true.

So that was Mark Gregory Pegg in a most holy war, the Alba Gentian crusade and the battle

for Christendom, the story of the Cathars, and Tom, you ended our last episode.

Renowned historian Tom Holland.

With that quotation, we discussed the book The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown.

We talked about the Holy Blood and the Holy Grail.

We talked about this extraordinary series of fantasists and con artists and hoaxes whose

fake manuscripts and stories of buried treasure and buried bloodlines ultimately all flowed

into the success of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code and behind it all is the story of this

shadowy, secretive, sort of shadow church, I suppose, called the Cathars in the Middle

Ages.

And you ended by, with that quotation, they're basically saying that it's not just that

the conspiracy theories from the novels are not true, but that are not of the history

may not even be true.

And specifically, the histories that were written in the 70s through to the beginning

of the 21st century and that in a sense they are kind of high-brow versions of The Da Vinci

Code that both of them are recycling conspiracy theories that are not actually true.

So just to sort of, as an incredibly accessible sort of summary, for those people who are completely

guarantee all this, the standard view that you would find in a sort of encyclopedia

or something.

Cathars.

...