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Updated: June 9, 2025
THE ALBIGENSIAN WAR. The war against the Albigenses began in the reign of Philip; but he pleaded that his hands were full, and left it to be waged by the nobles. That sect had its seat in the south of France, and derived its name from the city of Albi. It held certain heterodox tenets, and rejected the authority of the priesthood.
Merchants from the Lower Danube were often seen in the fairs of Prague; and the Lower Danube was peculiarly the seat of the Paulician theology. The Church, torn by schism, and fiercely assailed at once in England and in the German empire, was in a situation scarcely less perilous than at the crisis which preceded the Albigensian crusade. But this danger also passed by.
He then accompanied his bishop to southern France on the eve of the Albigensian crusade and was deeply shocked to see the prevalence of heresy. His host at Toulouse happened to be an Albigensian, and Dominic spent the night in converting him. He then and there determined to devote his life to the extirpation of heresy.
Simon was the son of another Simon of Montfort, whose name had become memorable for his ruthless crusade against the Albigensian heretics in Southern Gaul, and who had inherited the Earldom of Leicester through his mother, a sister and co-heiress of the last Earl of the house of Beaumont.
There is a very curious account of this siege in a Provencal poem on the Albigensian War, from which I will quote a few lines, only premising that in the original the castle is called the Capitol: "The townsmen set up their engines against the Crusaders in the castle, and so battered it that castle and watch-tower were broken, beams and lead and stone.
The writer makes a jump to the year 1209, when Carcassonne, then forming part of the realm of the viscounts of Beziers and infected by the Albigensian heresy, was besieged, in the name of the Pope, by the terrible Simon de Montfort and his army of crusaders. Simon was ac- customed to success, and the town succumbed in the course of a fortnight.
During the two generations which followed the Albigensian crusade, the power of the Papacy had been at the height. Frederic the Second, the ablest and most accomplished of the long line of German Caesars, had in vain exhausted all the resources of military and political skill in the attempt to defend the rights of the civil power against the encroachments of the Church.
With the knights who were coming in ever increasing numbers to do battle against the Moors, now that the time of the Crusades had passed, there came a goodly number of the troubadours and minstrels who had recently been driven from Provence by the cruel Simon de Montfort at the time of the Albigensian massacres, and the whole condition of Spanish society was such that the stern simplicity of the early Spaniards quickly disappeared.
With the terrible Albigensian Crusade, the voice of the singer was no longer heard in the land, and the poetic fire, which had burned with so fierce a blaze at times, smouldered for long years, until in the beginning of the fourteenth century the flames burst forth anew.
To the youthful days of Frederic II belong the Albigensian Crusade, the futile campaign of authority against Averroes and Aristotle, the heresy-hunts of volunteer inquisitors in Italy and Germany.
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