History of the Crusades

the Crusades Episode 114, the Crusade against the Cathars, the people legates.

Hello again.

Last week we took a closer look at Count Raymond the sixth of Toulouse and saw that

he was markedly different from the Ramons who had preceded him. We saw that remand the sixth had been married to

a Cathar, his second wife Beatrice from the notoriously heretical Troncival family, and we saw him excommunicated

from the church shortly after he came to power, over a dispute involving the building of fortifications at San Gill.

We also saw Count Raymond the sixth married Joanna, the sister of the sworn enemy of King Philip II of France,

the English King Richard the Lionheart, a marriage which didn't go at all well for Joanna.

The year 1198 was to mark a change in the relationship between the Count of Toulouse and the church.

Because in the year 1198, the 92-year-old Pope Celestine the third died to be replaced by a Pope as different from the elderly

and predictable Pope Celestine as it was possible to be. The young, energetic and ambitious Pope Innocent the third.

When Pope Innocent was elected to the Papacy, he immediately recognized that there were three problems which needed fixing.

The first was the fact that Jerusalem was under Muslim control. The second was that the kings of Europe

needed to realize that they were all servants of God and therefore servants of the papacy. and thirdly and finally the growing problem of heresy in southern France. He tried to fix the first problem by launching the Fourth Crusade.

Unfortunately, as we all know, this crusade didn't result in the retaking of Jerusalem, but in the sack of the Christian

city of Constantinople.

He tried to solve the second problem by ordering the Kings of Europe to do his bidding.

That was proving about as successful as the previous solution.

So the question we all want to know the answer to is what was Pope Innocent the

third going to do about the heresy problem in the south of France.

Well, he decided to start off by taking a somewhat conciliatory approach to the issue. He lifted the ban of excommunication from Count Raymond the sixth,

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