History of the Crusades

the Crusades Episode 100 and Episode 111 the Crusade against the Cathars, the origins of the Cathars.

Hello again.

Last week we took a closer look at southern France on the eve of the Crusade against the Cathars. This week we will take a look at the Cathars themselves.

In a nutshell the Cathars were religious devotees who had strayed so far from the Orthodox

teachings of the Latin Church that not only were they viewed as heretics,

there were many who questioned whether they could even be classed as Christians. Central to their belief was the distinction between the temporal and the eternal, the dark and the light, the material and the spiritual.

To the Cathars, the material world was the realm of the devil, only the spiritual world was pure and divine.

Unsurprisingly then, they rejected material possessions, preached celibacy and spurned many pleasures of the material world.

They had no churches, no holy objects, and their spiritual leaders, known as the

perfect wore only common everyday clothes.

The perfect were vegetarians,

although everyday Cathars could eat whatever food they liked.

They rejected the sacraments of the Catholic Church and had only

one ritual of their own, called the Consolumentum. The Consolumentum was used to ordain a new perfect or to prepare dying

Cathars for their Old Testament, taking for their own scriptures, the New Testament, particularly the Gospel

according to St John. These were translated into the language of southern France, Long dock and circulated amongst the Cathars.

When a perfect was ordained following the ritual of consolumentum, he or she was presented with their own copy of this holy book, which was usually small enough to be held in the palm of the hand.

This being a couple of centuries before the invention of the printing press,

the book would have been copied out laboriously by hand. Only a few of these books have survived

into modern times, although if you are curious there is one on display at the Palais des Art in Lyon.

As you might expect, it is a thing of great beauty, featuring early Gothic calligraphy and illuminated capital letters.

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