History of the Crusades

the Crusades Episode 182, the crusade against the Cathars, Monteu.

Hello again.

Last week we saw disaster descend for the Cathars of the County of Foix in the form of the betrayal of the network established by the Ote brothers by one of their own.

This week we are going to take some time out of the narrative to take a closer look at a village within the county of Foix, the village of Monteu.

Now most of the information I will be relaying to you in this episode

comes from the fabulous book Monteu by the French historian Emmanuel L'wa L'A.

Who in turn gained most of his information from the Inquisition register of the Inquisitor Jacques Fernier, a zealous cleric who would later

become one of the Avignon popes taking the name Benedict the 12th. Monteu was in some ways a typical medieval village and in other ways as we shall see shortly

it was entirely unique.

Looking at Monteu should give us a deeper understanding of how the Cathar faith affected people on a day-to-day basis,

and it should also shed some light on what it would have been like to live in a small village

in the Pyrenees in the early 14th century.

Monteu is located high in the Pyrenees in the county of Foix near the border of the kingdom of Aragon.

There were no roads leading to Monteu in the 14th century and it was accessible to the outside world only by mountain tracks,

most of which were quite treacherous in bad weather.

The village contained between 200 and 250 residents and was large enough to have a

castle which looked down over the village. The main street in the village led down to the church which was

built below the village and below that was the cemetery and a small chapel. You can visit Monteu today. The castle is now a ruin, but the church and the chapel are still standing.

I'll post a photo of Modern Monteu on the Facebook page. The village itself wasn't fortified and

in times of strife the villages were expected to make their way up to the castle where

they could seek refuge. The houses as you would expect were a mixture of

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