Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine.

Denounced as heretics by the Catholic Church, the Cathars were an offshoot Christian movement

which emerged in southern Europe

during the 12th century. But what was it about their beliefs that was so outrageous to the

Orthodox medieval church, and how was their existence so quickly snuffed out?

Speaking to Emily Briffett for today's podcast, historian Claire Taylor reveals more

about the Cathars way of life and the efforts made to suppress them. Hi Claire, thank you so much

for joining me on the History Extra podcast. Hi, Emily. Thanks very much for having me. So we are going

to be delving into listener questions all about the Cathars.

Now, my first question for you to start us off is can you give us sort of the top line chart

topping hits of who were the Cathars? Okay. Well, as we might expand on, it's a slightly

contentious question, but the big sort of established

picture is that they were a group of people who were extremely dangerous to the Catholic Church,

and they lived mainly in southern France and in northern Italy, which we call Lombardy, southern France

we call the Longadoc, and they believed in

two gods. So they answered the question, where does evil come from? So, you know, if God loves

everybody, why is there so much misery in the world? And they said that there's two gods. There's a good

God and an evil God. And the good God,

unfortunately, isn't able to help us out. We need to sort of talk about that elephant in the

room question about the existence of the Cathars. Would you mind giving us the big debates

of both sides? Where are we sitting? Right. Okay. So the traditional picture then is that they were a group of

people with sort of two tiers to their movement. They were the people which we call historically

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