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Updated: June 23, 2025
'Go to, said I; 'it is because the Church of England is not a persecuting church, that those whom you call the respectable part are leaving her; it is because they can't do with the poor Dissenters what Simon de Montfort did with the Albigenses, and the cruel Piedmontese with the Vaudois, that they turn to bloody Rome; the Pope will no doubt welcome them, for the Pope, do you see, being very much in want, will welcome
The country is sown with the ashes of martyrs. Long before the execution of Brousson, the Peyrou at Montpellier had been the Calvary of the South of France. As early as the twelfth century, the Albigenses, who inhabited the district, excited the wrath of the Popes.
From that period until the appearance of Luther, a succession of sects Waldenses, Albigenses, Perfectists, Lollards, Poplicans, Arnaldists, Bohemian Brothers waged perpetual but unequal warfare with the power and depravity of the Church, fertilizing with their blood the future field of the Reformation. Nowhere was the persecution of heretics more relentless than in the Netherlands.
Of these the oldest may have arisen before the Mongol conquest, from contact with Greeks or Slaves, particularly with the Bulgarian Bogomiles, the ancestors or Oriental brethren of the Albigenses. Other heresies sprang up later in the North, in the Novgorod region, from intercourse with Jewish or other Western traders.
The knight received his arms blessed by the Church, he was sworn to defend the Church, and he was as ready to turn his weapons against heretics in Europe as against infidels in Syria. Military persecutions of heretics assumed the form of a mania. There were crusades against the Moors in Spain, against the Albigenses, and against other heretics.
The great pope was not more zealous against Islam than against the heterogeneous sects which were revolting against sacerdotalism; whereof the horrors of the crusade against the Albigenses are the painful witness. Not the least momentous event in the rule of this mightiest of the popes was his authorisation of the two orders of mendicant friars, the disciples of St. Dominic, and of St.
In the XIII century, the zeal of the Catholic party, reinforced by the political interests of its members, grew most hot and dangerous. Saint Dominic had come into the South; and in his fearful, fiery sermons, he not only prophesied that the Albigenses would swell the number of the damned at the Day of Judgment, but also advocated that, living, they should know the hell of Inquisition.
These beliefs survived for a thousand years throughout Christendom: they were held by a great multitude of persecuted sects, from the Albigenses and Cathars to the eastern Paulicians. The catholic church found it necessary to prohibit the circulation of the Old Testament among laymen very largely on account of the polemics of the Cathars against the Hebrew God.
It was no light affair to assault the church in the days of Innocent III. The terrible crusade against the Albigenses, beginning in 1207, was the joint work of the most powerful of popes and one of the most powerful of French kings.
In southern France there were many adherents of both the Albigenses and the Waldensians, especially in the county of Toulouse. At the beginning of the thirteenth century there was in this region an open contempt for the Church and a bold defense of heretical teachings even among the higher classes. Against the people of this flourishing land Innocent III preached a crusade in 1208.
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