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Pivotal Moments in World History
A Most Holy War: The Albigensian Crusade and the Battle for Christendom
In January of 1208, a papal legate was murdered on the banks of the Rhone in southern France. A furious Pope Innocent III accused heretics of the crime and called upon all Christians to exterminate heresy between the Garonne and Rhone rivers--a vast region now known as Languedoc--in a great
crusade. This most holy war, the first in which Christians were promised salvation for killing other Christians, lasted twenty bloody years--it was a long savage battle for the soul of Christendom.
In A Most Holy War , historian Mark Pegg has produced a swift-moving, gripping narrative of this horrific crusade, drawing in part on thousands of testimonies collected by inquisitors in the years 1235 to 1245. These accounts of ordinary men and women, remembering what it was like to live through
such brutal times, bring the story vividly to life. Pegg argues that generations of historians (and novelists) have misunderstood the crusade; they assumed it was a war against the Cathars, the most famous heretics of the Middle Ages. The Cathars, Pegg reveals, never existed. He further shows how
a millennial fervor about "cleansing" the world of heresy, coupled with a fear that Christendom was being eaten away from within by heretics who looked no different than other Christians, made the battles, sieges, and massacres of the crusade almost apocalyptic in their cruel intensity. In
responding to this fear with a holy genocidal war, Innocent III fundamentally changed how Western civilization dealt with individuals accused of corrupting society. This fundamental change, Pegg argues, led directly to the creation of the inquisition, the rise of an anti-Semitism dedicated to the
violent elimination of Jews, and even the holy violence of the Reconquista in Spain and in the New World in the fifteenth century. All derive their divinely sanctioned slaughter from the Albigensian Crusade.
Haunting and immersive, A Most Holy War opens an important new perspective on a truly pivotal moment in world history, a first and distant foreshadowing of the genocide and holy violence in the modern world.
crusade. This most holy war, the first in which Christians were promised salvation for killing other Christians, lasted twenty bloody years--it was a long savage battle for the soul of Christendom.
In A Most Holy War , historian Mark Pegg has produced a swift-moving, gripping narrative of this horrific crusade, drawing in part on thousands of testimonies collected by inquisitors in the years 1235 to 1245. These accounts of ordinary men and women, remembering what it was like to live through
such brutal times, bring the story vividly to life. Pegg argues that generations of historians (and novelists) have misunderstood the crusade; they assumed it was a war against the Cathars, the most famous heretics of the Middle Ages. The Cathars, Pegg reveals, never existed. He further shows how
a millennial fervor about "cleansing" the world of heresy, coupled with a fear that Christendom was being eaten away from within by heretics who looked no different than other Christians, made the battles, sieges, and massacres of the crusade almost apocalyptic in their cruel intensity. In
responding to this fear with a holy genocidal war, Innocent III fundamentally changed how Western civilization dealt with individuals accused of corrupting society. This fundamental change, Pegg argues, led directly to the creation of the inquisition, the rise of an anti-Semitism dedicated to the
violent elimination of Jews, and even the holy violence of the Reconquista in Spain and in the New World in the fifteenth century. All derive their divinely sanctioned slaughter from the Albigensian Crusade.
Haunting and immersive, A Most Holy War opens an important new perspective on a truly pivotal moment in world history, a first and distant foreshadowing of the genocide and holy violence in the modern world.
253 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2008
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October 27, 2011
This is quite a book. And it's certainly good to read if you're looking for a good debate. I was not a fan, but to be fair, this book does have a few things going for it. Pegg makes some good points about the sources for the Albigensian Crusade. The fact that some historians have been rather hasty in applying sources written in northern France in the 1230s and 1240s - several decades after the crusade had begun - to the beliefs of those in the south in the late 1100s is a point well worth remembering. Pegg likewise makes an interesting study of the 'good men' and 'good women' of Occitania in the 12th century, showing that practices frequently labeled as purely heretical may have simply been a regionally distinctive social practice (though to be truly convincing, Pegg would have needed to spend quite a bit more time on this aspect of his argument, and provide a lot more documentation). While I wasn't entirely convinced by this part of his argument, it's very interesting and a valuable and astute point to raise.
But then we get to the last 3/4 of the book, which mostly consists of a narrative history of the Albigensian Crusade. To say it's polarizing would be a little bit of an understatement. First off, Pegg has a habit of attributing feelings and dialogue and scenery-setting that he couldn't possibly know from the sources to his narrative. I get that some people like that, and think that it adds momentum to the narrative, but it's one of my biggest history pet-peeves. There's really no reason to tell me how a historical figure from 800 years ago felt about something that another figure may or may not have said. The books is also highly emotive in its language, to the point of being distracting. Phrases like "God's homicidal pleasure" and "truly being like Christ involved wallowing in blood" (yikes!)are all over the place. But again, that sort of thing is largely a personal preference, and your mileage on that front may vary.
The real problem is twofold. The first aspect is the fact that Pegg seems to have a real distaste for the medieval church. That's fairly understandable! By modern standards, the medieval church did some pretty bad stuff. But if you're going to write a history in which the medieval church is a main player, it's necessary to at least attempt to understand them on their own terms. Pegg seems dead set on turning them into the villains in his story, with papal legates 'hissing' their lines of dialogue and hordes of crusaders universally driven to mass murder by 'apocalyptic exigency' after deliberately misunderstanding the faith of those in the south of France. For such a big and emotionally-charged claim, there's very little evidence outside of some monastic pro-crusade tracts, which is a shaky basis when it's being applied wholesale to the crusaders themselves. Honestly, the northern crusaders aren't terribly likeable in this period in history even if you don't demonize them, so the whole thing seems sort of like overkill.
It also ties into my second problem with the book's argument: his claim that genocide and anti-Semitism arose in the west thanks to the Albigensian Crusade. It's a tricky argument to make in any case - lawyers have had lots of fights over what exactly makes a genocide - but it's even harder here, considering how little time is spent exploring the exact motivations for the crusade among those who took part and how relatively little time is spent exploring the activities of those they attacked. The Albigensian Crusade absolutely resulted in a lot of terribly sad and needless violence, I don't think anyone would argue with that. But to position it at such an integral point in world history with the evidence presented seems somewhat over the top.
Overall, I wouldn't recommend this book as an introduction to the Albigensian Crusade. It's a bit too polarizing for that. But if it's a topic you're interested in, though, it's a provocative enough thesis that I'd definitely recommend it as a second or third look at the subject.
But then we get to the last 3/4 of the book, which mostly consists of a narrative history of the Albigensian Crusade. To say it's polarizing would be a little bit of an understatement. First off, Pegg has a habit of attributing feelings and dialogue and scenery-setting that he couldn't possibly know from the sources to his narrative. I get that some people like that, and think that it adds momentum to the narrative, but it's one of my biggest history pet-peeves. There's really no reason to tell me how a historical figure from 800 years ago felt about something that another figure may or may not have said. The books is also highly emotive in its language, to the point of being distracting. Phrases like "God's homicidal pleasure" and "truly being like Christ involved wallowing in blood" (yikes!)are all over the place. But again, that sort of thing is largely a personal preference, and your mileage on that front may vary.
The real problem is twofold. The first aspect is the fact that Pegg seems to have a real distaste for the medieval church. That's fairly understandable! By modern standards, the medieval church did some pretty bad stuff. But if you're going to write a history in which the medieval church is a main player, it's necessary to at least attempt to understand them on their own terms. Pegg seems dead set on turning them into the villains in his story, with papal legates 'hissing' their lines of dialogue and hordes of crusaders universally driven to mass murder by 'apocalyptic exigency' after deliberately misunderstanding the faith of those in the south of France. For such a big and emotionally-charged claim, there's very little evidence outside of some monastic pro-crusade tracts, which is a shaky basis when it's being applied wholesale to the crusaders themselves. Honestly, the northern crusaders aren't terribly likeable in this period in history even if you don't demonize them, so the whole thing seems sort of like overkill.
It also ties into my second problem with the book's argument: his claim that genocide and anti-Semitism arose in the west thanks to the Albigensian Crusade. It's a tricky argument to make in any case - lawyers have had lots of fights over what exactly makes a genocide - but it's even harder here, considering how little time is spent exploring the exact motivations for the crusade among those who took part and how relatively little time is spent exploring the activities of those they attacked. The Albigensian Crusade absolutely resulted in a lot of terribly sad and needless violence, I don't think anyone would argue with that. But to position it at such an integral point in world history with the evidence presented seems somewhat over the top.
Overall, I wouldn't recommend this book as an introduction to the Albigensian Crusade. It's a bit too polarizing for that. But if it's a topic you're interested in, though, it's a provocative enough thesis that I'd definitely recommend it as a second or third look at the subject.
October 30, 2020
"A Most Holy War" is lurid and polemic account of the Albigensian Crusade (1209 to 1229) against supposed heretics living in what was then the extreme south-west portion of France bordering the Kingdom of Aragon. The battles occurred primarily in the territories controlled by the Count of Toulouse, the Count of Foix and the Viscount of Béziers and Carcassone. Pegg's provocative and outrageous conclusion is: "The Albigensian Crusade ushered genocide into the West by linking divine salvation to mass murder, by making slaughter as loving an act as His [i.e. Christ's] sacrifice on the cross." (p. 189) Pope Innocent III who formally declared the Albignesian Crusade is thus the father of ethnic cleansing in Europe. Not only is Pegg's tone hysterical, his presentation of the Albignesian heretsy and historical reality in general is wildly inaccurate.
Pegg begins his book with the bizarre assertion that there never was a heretical church in the Albigensian region at the time the Albignesian crusade . Some of the clerics in the region had reported on "good men" (bons omes) and "good women" (bonas femmas) who tried to live in simplicity, dressed eccentrically in some instances and occasionally preached. It was not until ten years after the crusade started that the Catholic clergy began asserting that these good men and women constituted an organized movement that was deliberately promoting heresy. The writers of the Catholic Church began to argue that the Albigensian heretics were linked to past heresies that had occurred in other regions or countries notably the Cathars and Bogomils. All of this was brazen falsehood. Despite the many prosecutions, the Inquisitors never identified any organization or formal doctrines of the phantom Albignesian Heresy. The savage Crusade had in fact been based on the fabrication of a murderous mind looking for victims.
The consensus among French historians is quite different. The French historians would agree that the initiative for the crusdade came entirely from the Catholic Church. They argue that the heresy was linked to the excessive tithes that the Catholic Church attempted to extract from the peasants of the region. Those that refused to pay were routinely excommunicated by the Catholic Church which made the peasants susceptible to joining the heresy.
While aversion to the tithes was a major factor, the heretics still had a well-defined set of believes and practies. They believed that the physical world was the creation of the devil while the spiritual world belonged to God. The heretics participatd in an initiation rite called the consolamentum. The "good men" (bons omes) were the priests of the heresy. They were not allowed either to eat meat or engage in sexual relations. The heretics rejected the Catholic doctrine of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Similiarly the heretics s did not believe that extreme unction administered by a Catholic priest had any effect. Rather salvation was achieved through the consolamentum administered by the "good men" (bons omes).
Most French historians would agree with Pegg that the driver of the Crusade was neither Louis VIII the king of France nor his son Louis IX. Rather the impetus came from Pope Innocent III who while urging that heretics in Europe be eradicated was also promoting a crusade to attack the Muslims in the Holy Land. The murder of a papal legate near Toulouse in 1208, provided Innocent III with the pretext to declare a crusade against the Duke of Toulouse for allegedly harboring heretics. Innocent urged Louis VIII to lead the crusade. Louis VIII after much procrastination finally complied. For the next 30 years, Louis VIII and his son Louis IX would lead a series of campaigns against the Albignesian heretics.
Although the efforts of the two Louis were decidedly half-hearted, they did achieve total victory by 1229. Their lack of commitment can seen in their decision not to give the territory of Toulouse to a French nobleman when they first conquered it but rather to an English adventurer Simon de Montfort who ultimately perished.
The Albignesian Crusade consisted of sieges of cities that typically ended in the massacres. When Innocent III was informed that many of the civilians who died were good Catholics not heretics. His response was that the Crusaders should kill everyone and let God sort out the victims.
Pegg’s narrative is warped by his visceral dislike of with Innocent III and his analysis is profoundly distorted which is not to say that he is wrong to deplore the Albignesian crusade. However, Pegg could have made his point without straying so far from the truth. I am appalled that that the Oxford University Press should have published this dreadful book.
Pegg begins his book with the bizarre assertion that there never was a heretical church in the Albigensian region at the time the Albignesian crusade . Some of the clerics in the region had reported on "good men" (bons omes) and "good women" (bonas femmas) who tried to live in simplicity, dressed eccentrically in some instances and occasionally preached. It was not until ten years after the crusade started that the Catholic clergy began asserting that these good men and women constituted an organized movement that was deliberately promoting heresy. The writers of the Catholic Church began to argue that the Albigensian heretics were linked to past heresies that had occurred in other regions or countries notably the Cathars and Bogomils. All of this was brazen falsehood. Despite the many prosecutions, the Inquisitors never identified any organization or formal doctrines of the phantom Albignesian Heresy. The savage Crusade had in fact been based on the fabrication of a murderous mind looking for victims.
The consensus among French historians is quite different. The French historians would agree that the initiative for the crusdade came entirely from the Catholic Church. They argue that the heresy was linked to the excessive tithes that the Catholic Church attempted to extract from the peasants of the region. Those that refused to pay were routinely excommunicated by the Catholic Church which made the peasants susceptible to joining the heresy.
While aversion to the tithes was a major factor, the heretics still had a well-defined set of believes and practies. They believed that the physical world was the creation of the devil while the spiritual world belonged to God. The heretics participatd in an initiation rite called the consolamentum. The "good men" (bons omes) were the priests of the heresy. They were not allowed either to eat meat or engage in sexual relations. The heretics rejected the Catholic doctrine of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Similiarly the heretics s did not believe that extreme unction administered by a Catholic priest had any effect. Rather salvation was achieved through the consolamentum administered by the "good men" (bons omes).
Most French historians would agree with Pegg that the driver of the Crusade was neither Louis VIII the king of France nor his son Louis IX. Rather the impetus came from Pope Innocent III who while urging that heretics in Europe be eradicated was also promoting a crusade to attack the Muslims in the Holy Land. The murder of a papal legate near Toulouse in 1208, provided Innocent III with the pretext to declare a crusade against the Duke of Toulouse for allegedly harboring heretics. Innocent urged Louis VIII to lead the crusade. Louis VIII after much procrastination finally complied. For the next 30 years, Louis VIII and his son Louis IX would lead a series of campaigns against the Albignesian heretics.
Although the efforts of the two Louis were decidedly half-hearted, they did achieve total victory by 1229. Their lack of commitment can seen in their decision not to give the territory of Toulouse to a French nobleman when they first conquered it but rather to an English adventurer Simon de Montfort who ultimately perished.
The Albignesian Crusade consisted of sieges of cities that typically ended in the massacres. When Innocent III was informed that many of the civilians who died were good Catholics not heretics. His response was that the Crusaders should kill everyone and let God sort out the victims.
Pegg’s narrative is warped by his visceral dislike of with Innocent III and his analysis is profoundly distorted which is not to say that he is wrong to deplore the Albignesian crusade. However, Pegg could have made his point without straying so far from the truth. I am appalled that that the Oxford University Press should have published this dreadful book.
December 2, 2020
This book is a classic example of why it is that people whose bias and worldview is as pronounced as is the case here should not write histories where what they see is what they are putting in. The Albegensian crusade is not as well known as it should be, and this book presents it with an attempt to blacken the reputation of the Catholic hierarchy but cannot escape the certain muddiness of what is involved in this situation as local power figures fight for power, using religion in some ways as a cover for dynastic ambitions as the French and Aragonnese and local Languedoc houses struggle for dominance in the face of a culture that the author has a much higher degree of fondness for than appears to be merited by the case that is provided. This book discusses an area of history that few people focus on unless they are fans of medieval history, but this book leaves more questions than it provides answers, and among those questions, first and foremost, is the fitness for a biased author to deal with a matter where bias is such a problem in sources. The author clearly takes the point of view of the local troubadours and that is a major failing, given his failure to overcome their own biases.
This book is in the neighborhood of two hundred pages and the author makes the decision to divide the book into numbered rather than named chapters that detail the history of the Albegensian crusades from about 1176 or so until about sixty years later or so. During the period the area of Southern France found itself involved in a high degree of competition over power. The local counts in the area sought to maintain their power and have independent policies as much as possible in the space between the English, French, and Spanish monarchies, all of whom wanted to expand or maintain their power in the region. When you add to this a complicated land tenure system that required the development of conflict-resolution and diplomacy and the complexity of religious loyalties, the result is lamentable but not particularly surprising. What is striking is that an author who praises the local inhabitants of the region for their diplomatic skill would comment on the distinct failures of those people to engage in the sort of diplomacy that would have preserved their freedom in the face of royal ambition and religious anger from the Pope and Catholic hierarchy.
Among the most troubling aspects of this book is the author's praise of the supposed courtesy of the local inhabitants and his praise of what they considered to be a "good man" or a "good woman." Praising people for courtesy who are hostile to parenting, have no fondness for biblical law and godly morality, and who the author views as being genuinely Christian while also simultaneously commenting on their closeness in histories to various ancient heresies. It is almost as if the author considers heresy to be a legitimate Christian policy. To some degree, the situation in Southern France in the late 12th and early 13th century is more than a little complicated in terms of the belief system of the inhabitants and the political and religious situation that can be found there, and there is a high degree of brutality to be found in the battles and razzias and sieges that the crusade featured, but this author is so biased in favor of those who have been considered, with reason, to be at least problematic as one might imagine it to be. And that is a shame, because there is clearly the material here for a good book that examines the tangled aspect of loyalties and ambitions in this place and time, it's just that the author is not equipped to handle it.
This book is in the neighborhood of two hundred pages and the author makes the decision to divide the book into numbered rather than named chapters that detail the history of the Albegensian crusades from about 1176 or so until about sixty years later or so. During the period the area of Southern France found itself involved in a high degree of competition over power. The local counts in the area sought to maintain their power and have independent policies as much as possible in the space between the English, French, and Spanish monarchies, all of whom wanted to expand or maintain their power in the region. When you add to this a complicated land tenure system that required the development of conflict-resolution and diplomacy and the complexity of religious loyalties, the result is lamentable but not particularly surprising. What is striking is that an author who praises the local inhabitants of the region for their diplomatic skill would comment on the distinct failures of those people to engage in the sort of diplomacy that would have preserved their freedom in the face of royal ambition and religious anger from the Pope and Catholic hierarchy.
Among the most troubling aspects of this book is the author's praise of the supposed courtesy of the local inhabitants and his praise of what they considered to be a "good man" or a "good woman." Praising people for courtesy who are hostile to parenting, have no fondness for biblical law and godly morality, and who the author views as being genuinely Christian while also simultaneously commenting on their closeness in histories to various ancient heresies. It is almost as if the author considers heresy to be a legitimate Christian policy. To some degree, the situation in Southern France in the late 12th and early 13th century is more than a little complicated in terms of the belief system of the inhabitants and the political and religious situation that can be found there, and there is a high degree of brutality to be found in the battles and razzias and sieges that the crusade featured, but this author is so biased in favor of those who have been considered, with reason, to be at least problematic as one might imagine it to be. And that is a shame, because there is clearly the material here for a good book that examines the tangled aspect of loyalties and ambitions in this place and time, it's just that the author is not equipped to handle it.
June 23, 2018
After months of waiting in anticipation to read this book, I put it down within minutes once I finally did. Then I decided the next day to read it anyway. Quite funny how that worked out. The reasons for my swift changes of mind was his methodology:
It's like Mark Gregory Pegg designed this entire paragraph just to mess with me, personally. It flies in the face of essentialism and praxeology. Here, I think Pegg summers from a fundamental misunderstanding on the place of history as a science. Just as we must assume that the laws of physics remained constant if we are to write a history, so do we have to assume that there are constants in human behavior. What those constants are, that is another question. One are no doubt the laws of praxeology, best laid down in Human Action. Praxeology is the study of human action, distinct from psychology. I don't want to dwell too much on this here, I only want to point out that any action is goal-oriented, and that we cannot conceive of it otherwise, or we wouldn't be able to sense any connection between motive and action, at all. Another constant would be the reality of the two sexes, although it manifested in different ways throughout history. To see gender as tabula rasa, though, that is never possible. Human aggression, likewise, cannot be thought away, and neither can love. We cannot make sense of history at all if we don't know any constants of the human condition. To do so
In practice, of course, history is not that much of a secondary science. Ruminations on human nature would not get us very far without knowledge of the historical record. Ludwig von Mises would not have written an a priori defense of free markets had he not lived in a society with an established market. Still, to claim that historicism could get us anywhere is not just wrong, it is dangerous. Dangerous because you can learn anything you want to learn from the historical record if you completely deny that the past behaved like the present in at least some ways. In particular, you can overturn already established knowledge with a half-hearted reference to the historical record. That's a beloved trick of social reformers. It is no coincidence that the historicist method was dear to both Karl Marx and Auguste Comte.
Usually, works based on a wrong methodology don't interest me. This time, however, it was different. The good thing about a historicist method is that it is so incredibly bad, you cannot consistently apply it. In practice, common sense will take the place of a conscious extrapolation from firmly established knowledge. No historian will read, say, of a murder, and genuinely wonder if that had anything to do with hatred or anger. He won't think that a killing was not necessarily willful or negligent, but maybe "something in between". That would be absurd. I trusted that the author was too intelligent to apply what he wrote above, and I wasn't disappointed. Quite possibly he had something far more modest in mind, but chose too strong language to express it. If he had just said that we cannot extrapolate from our particular styles of thinking and our modern ideologies into the past, I would have agreed fully.
After this excursion into methodology, let me talk about how the book treats its topic, the Albigensian Crusade. Here, I think we can distinguish the historical narrative, and the interpretation of it. The former feels complete, vivid, it flows well, is detailed, and is built on some astonishing scholarship, if the bibliography is anything to go by. Sometimes, it feels quite biased, and I have heard that the author included details that he couldn't have gained from the historical record itself, like emotions or facial expressions. The language makes for an engaging read but is too emotional for its own good. Still, I liked the narrative very much, and it makes up the bulk of this work. If you want to know the raw data of the Albigensian Crusade, so to speak, this might be the book for you. Of particular delight to me was the love for detail and accuracy with which the author treated southern French culture and the conduct of medieval warfare (especially siege warfare), and that the narrative was strongly character driven. And, for its occasional bias, the facts that allow you to make up your own mind are there. He talks about the pillaging of Simon de Montfort, but also of the cruelty and sneakiness with which the heretics operated, as when they tortured and blinded two knights or murdered some inquisitors and their following and made drinking cups of their skulls.
Which brings me to the interpretation, which is what this book is sold on. This interpretation is problematic, if not without merit. The author rightly challenges the popular notion that there was an organized Cathar Church, as well as the label of "Cathar". He goes further than this and paints the Cathars (will use this name for convenience's sake) as just another sect of orthodox Christians, not as heretics. He brings up some intriguing pieces of evidence: That claims of a Cathar Church were made only years after the crusade began; that the terms "good man" and "good woman" were generic honorary titles in southern France; and that the one document that is supposed to prove that there was a Cathar Church only proves this if we read this information into it first (circular reasoning, then). Also, that we cannot extrapolate from the fact that certain heresies existed after the Crusade that they also existed before it. The big problem here is that this punches holes in the narrative. The elephant in the room, if we accept the authors claims, is that we then have little explanation for the animosity that sparked the crusade. It reads like everyone is kicking at Raimund Roger for no reason at all. Economic reasons for the conflict are nowhere to be seen, cultural differences had existed for a long time before, there was no imminent political rebellion in southern France. What, then, started the conflict? Fear of heretics? As I said, the narrative is character driven, but the fear of heretics almost takes the place of a character, an idea that floats around somewhere, without really being embodied in anyone, and which has a huge impact on the world. But ideas aren't like that. They have to be in someone's mind to be cause of anything. This is a problem I also noticed in The Spanish Inquisition, which left me wondering why the conversos were persecuted if they didn't judaize anyone and had little wealth to steal. Here, too, I was puzzled why the Church would decide to persecute non-existent heretics with such vigor, and also (to a lesser degree) why the heretics would fight back with such fervor.
That is one problem with the interpretation, and another is that the evidence itself connects some dots which shouldn't be connected per the author. We know that the heretics harassed pregnant women, that they dismissed the old testament, and that they accepted lay preachers. How does that not point towards the gnostic dualism and antinatalism that is commonly ascribed to the Cathars? Also, and for this point I have to thank Claire Taylor, whose book I sadly couldn't find anywhere yet: Why would the inquisition, if it made up the heresy itself, differentiate between so many different heresies? It never lumped together the Cathars and the Waldensians, for example.
The last chapter of this book was particularly bad, not to an extent that it would ruin anything, but I wouldn't say it delivered much of value. The author claims that the Albigensian Crusade was a genocide, but it is clear he laid out his own definition in such a way as to make this claim:
This borders the line to dishonesty for me. Thankfully, it arrives at the end of the book, when the careful and critical reader learned enough to dismiss it. Shortly afterwards, the author makes some even more outrageous claims, going so far as to say that Islam did not threaten Christendom, when it had kept on conquering ever greater parts of Christian territory up to that point. Much of eastern Europe used to be occupied by Muslims; much of what is now Turkey used to be the Byzantine Empire; Palestine, Lebanon and Syria were more Christian than France, Germany and England are nowadays. How, then, can he pretend that Islam did not threaten Christianity at all?
Like I said, the narrative is very fine and carries this book quite well. It says a lot of good that I could judge the authors claims on the information he gave me. And parts of his interpretation, if he had been more modest, would be entirely sensible. I have no doubt that this book will educate more than it will misinform, but it is a book that has to be read intelligently. Don't be drawn in by the authors sensationalism, and you might learn a lot. I know I did.
Any meditation on the past that starts with the presumption that some things are universal in humans or in human society—never changing, inert, immobile—is to retreat from attempting a historical explanation about previous rhythms of existence. Studies are lauded that argue that there is, say, a pervasive male manner (with other men, with women, with meat)
imprinted into masculine genes over a month of prehistoric Sundays. Or that minds always respond in similar ways to tragedy. Or that hereditary behavioral traits impose habits (and occasionally beliefs) from one generation to the next. Or that religion is a primal response to primal fears. Millennia are flattened out, if not totally erased, in essentialism. Historical specificity is either dismissed as irrelevant or seen as epiphenomenal graffiti scratched on (and so disfiguring) unchanging customs and concepts. Arguing for immutable values from biology is no different from arguing for immutable values from theology—selfish genes, selfish doctrines, they both deny history. Assuming that why we do what we do, why we think what we think, is somehow or other beyond our control, and that we would be this way in mind and body whether we lived in Cleveland in 1952 or Toulouse in 1218, forfeits the vitality and distinctiveness of the past to the dead hand of
biological determinism, cognitive hotwiring, psychological innateness, liberal pleas for bygone victims, conservative pleas for God-given principles, and amaranthine mush about authenticity.
It's like Mark Gregory Pegg designed this entire paragraph just to mess with me, personally. It flies in the face of essentialism and praxeology. Here, I think Pegg summers from a fundamental misunderstanding on the place of history as a science. Just as we must assume that the laws of physics remained constant if we are to write a history, so do we have to assume that there are constants in human behavior. What those constants are, that is another question. One are no doubt the laws of praxeology, best laid down in Human Action. Praxeology is the study of human action, distinct from psychology. I don't want to dwell too much on this here, I only want to point out that any action is goal-oriented, and that we cannot conceive of it otherwise, or we wouldn't be able to sense any connection between motive and action, at all. Another constant would be the reality of the two sexes, although it manifested in different ways throughout history. To see gender as tabula rasa, though, that is never possible. Human aggression, likewise, cannot be thought away, and neither can love. We cannot make sense of history at all if we don't know any constants of the human condition. To do so
In practice, of course, history is not that much of a secondary science. Ruminations on human nature would not get us very far without knowledge of the historical record. Ludwig von Mises would not have written an a priori defense of free markets had he not lived in a society with an established market. Still, to claim that historicism could get us anywhere is not just wrong, it is dangerous. Dangerous because you can learn anything you want to learn from the historical record if you completely deny that the past behaved like the present in at least some ways. In particular, you can overturn already established knowledge with a half-hearted reference to the historical record. That's a beloved trick of social reformers. It is no coincidence that the historicist method was dear to both Karl Marx and Auguste Comte.
Usually, works based on a wrong methodology don't interest me. This time, however, it was different. The good thing about a historicist method is that it is so incredibly bad, you cannot consistently apply it. In practice, common sense will take the place of a conscious extrapolation from firmly established knowledge. No historian will read, say, of a murder, and genuinely wonder if that had anything to do with hatred or anger. He won't think that a killing was not necessarily willful or negligent, but maybe "something in between". That would be absurd. I trusted that the author was too intelligent to apply what he wrote above, and I wasn't disappointed. Quite possibly he had something far more modest in mind, but chose too strong language to express it. If he had just said that we cannot extrapolate from our particular styles of thinking and our modern ideologies into the past, I would have agreed fully.
After this excursion into methodology, let me talk about how the book treats its topic, the Albigensian Crusade. Here, I think we can distinguish the historical narrative, and the interpretation of it. The former feels complete, vivid, it flows well, is detailed, and is built on some astonishing scholarship, if the bibliography is anything to go by. Sometimes, it feels quite biased, and I have heard that the author included details that he couldn't have gained from the historical record itself, like emotions or facial expressions. The language makes for an engaging read but is too emotional for its own good. Still, I liked the narrative very much, and it makes up the bulk of this work. If you want to know the raw data of the Albigensian Crusade, so to speak, this might be the book for you. Of particular delight to me was the love for detail and accuracy with which the author treated southern French culture and the conduct of medieval warfare (especially siege warfare), and that the narrative was strongly character driven. And, for its occasional bias, the facts that allow you to make up your own mind are there. He talks about the pillaging of Simon de Montfort, but also of the cruelty and sneakiness with which the heretics operated, as when they tortured and blinded two knights or murdered some inquisitors and their following and made drinking cups of their skulls.
Which brings me to the interpretation, which is what this book is sold on. This interpretation is problematic, if not without merit. The author rightly challenges the popular notion that there was an organized Cathar Church, as well as the label of "Cathar". He goes further than this and paints the Cathars (will use this name for convenience's sake) as just another sect of orthodox Christians, not as heretics. He brings up some intriguing pieces of evidence: That claims of a Cathar Church were made only years after the crusade began; that the terms "good man" and "good woman" were generic honorary titles in southern France; and that the one document that is supposed to prove that there was a Cathar Church only proves this if we read this information into it first (circular reasoning, then). Also, that we cannot extrapolate from the fact that certain heresies existed after the Crusade that they also existed before it. The big problem here is that this punches holes in the narrative. The elephant in the room, if we accept the authors claims, is that we then have little explanation for the animosity that sparked the crusade. It reads like everyone is kicking at Raimund Roger for no reason at all. Economic reasons for the conflict are nowhere to be seen, cultural differences had existed for a long time before, there was no imminent political rebellion in southern France. What, then, started the conflict? Fear of heretics? As I said, the narrative is character driven, but the fear of heretics almost takes the place of a character, an idea that floats around somewhere, without really being embodied in anyone, and which has a huge impact on the world. But ideas aren't like that. They have to be in someone's mind to be cause of anything. This is a problem I also noticed in The Spanish Inquisition, which left me wondering why the conversos were persecuted if they didn't judaize anyone and had little wealth to steal. Here, too, I was puzzled why the Church would decide to persecute non-existent heretics with such vigor, and also (to a lesser degree) why the heretics would fight back with such fervor.
That is one problem with the interpretation, and another is that the evidence itself connects some dots which shouldn't be connected per the author. We know that the heretics harassed pregnant women, that they dismissed the old testament, and that they accepted lay preachers. How does that not point towards the gnostic dualism and antinatalism that is commonly ascribed to the Cathars? Also, and for this point I have to thank Claire Taylor, whose book I sadly couldn't find anywhere yet: Why would the inquisition, if it made up the heresy itself, differentiate between so many different heresies? It never lumped together the Cathars and the Waldensians, for example.
The last chapter of this book was particularly bad, not to an extent that it would ruin anything, but I wouldn't say it delivered much of value. The author claims that the Albigensian Crusade was a genocide, but it is clear he laid out his own definition in such a way as to make this claim:
As horrific as is any bloodshed, past or present, distinctions must be made if a category like genocide is to have any useful historical meaning. First and foremost, it is an irrevocable moral obligation to eliminate specific people from the world who, if not wiped out rather sooner than later, will poison and destroy all human existence. Second, it is a historical vision that these same specific people have always existed through time (often in secret, often behind the scenes) and, while perpetually cancerous to civilization, have only recently begun to threaten the survival of the pure. Third, those deserving to be killed in vast numbers are actually very similar to their committed killers, and it is this similarity that makes them so menacing, so difficult to sort out from the virtuous. Fourth, there is a sense of divine pleasure experienced by mass murderers, a joyful knowledge that the relations between heaven and earth are maintained by the relentless extermination of particular men, women, and children. Fifth, an especially polluted region must be conquered, colonized, and systematically purged of specific people over years, if not decades. Sixth, in the activity of causing widespread death, individuals produce more than just a smile on the godhead, they actually become the godhead themselves. This is a definition of genocide; this is a definition of the Albigensian Crusade.
This borders the line to dishonesty for me. Thankfully, it arrives at the end of the book, when the careful and critical reader learned enough to dismiss it. Shortly afterwards, the author makes some even more outrageous claims, going so far as to say that Islam did not threaten Christendom, when it had kept on conquering ever greater parts of Christian territory up to that point. Much of eastern Europe used to be occupied by Muslims; much of what is now Turkey used to be the Byzantine Empire; Palestine, Lebanon and Syria were more Christian than France, Germany and England are nowadays. How, then, can he pretend that Islam did not threaten Christianity at all?
Like I said, the narrative is very fine and carries this book quite well. It says a lot of good that I could judge the authors claims on the information he gave me. And parts of his interpretation, if he had been more modest, would be entirely sensible. I have no doubt that this book will educate more than it will misinform, but it is a book that has to be read intelligently. Don't be drawn in by the authors sensationalism, and you might learn a lot. I know I did.
June 29, 2022
For me it's impossible not to compare this book with Laurence Marvin's "The Occitan war". I just finnished them both and it's the same subject.
A Most Holy War its not a bad book at all, but the lenguage it uses is sometimes hard to follow, a lot of quotes from Troubadors (poetic stuff), is chronologically a little more inestable (going forward and backwards at times),and more focused on the history, moral and ethic, rather than the military campaign.
A Most Holy War its not a bad book at all, but the lenguage it uses is sometimes hard to follow, a lot of quotes from Troubadors (poetic stuff), is chronologically a little more inestable (going forward and backwards at times),and more focused on the history, moral and ethic, rather than the military campaign.
January 17, 2011
A Most Holy War: The Albigensian Crusade and the Battle for Christendom by Mark Gregory Pegg is an attempt to address misconceptions regarding the Cathar heretics and modern portrayals of them. Pegg makes a strong case that the Cathars never existed, and that the twenty year long crusade in Southern France was a crusade against Albigensian heretics in a very specific geographic area. He has a very negative view towards past histories of these events, and he criticized the sources used in previous scholarship.
Pegg wrote that the Albigensian Crusade was a central event in the Middle Ages. It was the first time a pope called a crusade against Western Christians by declaring them heretics. Christians fought Christians, those who fought for the Pope were promised salvation and the heretics were killed for their unorthodox beliefs. He links the brutal crusade with the medieval mindset, propagated by the Church, in which heretics should be feared and hunted down because they appear so similar to orthodox Christians as to be indistinguishable but in reality they are a dire threat all of Christendom. Crusaders no longer had to travel to the Holy Land in order to receive absolution for sins; a campaign in France was an easier route to the same objective.
While Pegg states that there was a “moral obligation for mass murder,” the Pope was not telling everyone to go to France and kill heretics. There actually seemed to be some hesitation by the public to join this crusade, as Simon de Montfort had to resort to using mercenary armies. Pegg also tries to link the Albigensian Crusade with Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross, and that those who fought fellow Christians were imitating Christ. That connection was a stretch considering that Christ did not advocate violence, especially not against one’s co-religionists.
Pegg also stated that, “The Albigensian Crusade ushered genocide into the West by linking divine salvation to mass murder.” He then went on to describe six narrow categories with which to define genocide so that it fits his concept of the Albigensian Crusade. Redemptive homicide against one’s heretical neighbor became acceptable crusade practice and added another enemy to the list of acceptable crusading targets.
The chapters where Pegg described the heretics and some of their practices might be difficult for some readers to follow. Those sections seemed overly repetitive and drawn out to ensure the reader got the point. Good men and women were named and their societal and religious practices were explained. Stylistically the rest of the book flowed rather well and the reader will not get slowed down even though there is twenty years of history to read through before the end.
Pegg provides a book which is easy to read and which sheds some new light on the subject of the Albigensian Crusades. He provided sources which support his thesis and does not utilize contradictory evidence. However his personal disregard for past scholarship and inability to remain unbiased in his writing, his emphasis on genocide, and calling the crusade an imitation of Christ detracted from the credibility of the book.
Pegg wrote that the Albigensian Crusade was a central event in the Middle Ages. It was the first time a pope called a crusade against Western Christians by declaring them heretics. Christians fought Christians, those who fought for the Pope were promised salvation and the heretics were killed for their unorthodox beliefs. He links the brutal crusade with the medieval mindset, propagated by the Church, in which heretics should be feared and hunted down because they appear so similar to orthodox Christians as to be indistinguishable but in reality they are a dire threat all of Christendom. Crusaders no longer had to travel to the Holy Land in order to receive absolution for sins; a campaign in France was an easier route to the same objective.
While Pegg states that there was a “moral obligation for mass murder,” the Pope was not telling everyone to go to France and kill heretics. There actually seemed to be some hesitation by the public to join this crusade, as Simon de Montfort had to resort to using mercenary armies. Pegg also tries to link the Albigensian Crusade with Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross, and that those who fought fellow Christians were imitating Christ. That connection was a stretch considering that Christ did not advocate violence, especially not against one’s co-religionists.
Pegg also stated that, “The Albigensian Crusade ushered genocide into the West by linking divine salvation to mass murder.” He then went on to describe six narrow categories with which to define genocide so that it fits his concept of the Albigensian Crusade. Redemptive homicide against one’s heretical neighbor became acceptable crusade practice and added another enemy to the list of acceptable crusading targets.
The chapters where Pegg described the heretics and some of their practices might be difficult for some readers to follow. Those sections seemed overly repetitive and drawn out to ensure the reader got the point. Good men and women were named and their societal and religious practices were explained. Stylistically the rest of the book flowed rather well and the reader will not get slowed down even though there is twenty years of history to read through before the end.
Pegg provides a book which is easy to read and which sheds some new light on the subject of the Albigensian Crusades. He provided sources which support his thesis and does not utilize contradictory evidence. However his personal disregard for past scholarship and inability to remain unbiased in his writing, his emphasis on genocide, and calling the crusade an imitation of Christ detracted from the credibility of the book.
September 17, 2024
Pegg's history of the middle ages, Beatrice's Last Smile, was recommended by a friend. Then I saw that he has worked on this fascinating subject, and I found his article Albigenses in the Antipodes online and was stimulated by it to read A Most Holy War. He takes the extreme position that there never were any Cathars, nor even any religious sect misnamed Cathars.
Having now read it I believe that it deserves great acclaim because it supplies a serious lack and is satisfying in precisely the sense that most treatments of these events are dissatisfying.
He delivers on the war cry of his essay Albigenses in the Antipodes by rescuing the history of this crusade from what he calls "Intellectualist Bias", which he bitingly describes as the tendency to view human societies as "mise en scenes" for the literary record. Pegg, like not a few strong Australian academic, has been "brain drained" to the US.
I was disgusted by Sumption's treatment of the same subject.
We have enabled and done homage the Dominican Inquisitors and to the ultramontane papacy by lazily accepting their version of this crusade for centuries. As Pegg and quite a few other historians have pointed out, the annalles school of history, and Le Roy Ladurie specifically muddied our understanding by completely skirting the political dimensions of an episode which is explicitly and obviously political. What a boon to the perpetrators of state crime!
I see that not a few Catholics are offended by the naked opportunism of this "crusade" as depicted in Pegg's account, but those people have already decided to make one of history's more fecal discharges part of their steady spiritual diet!
As Adorno said...we do not want to curate the past ...history is not "remembrance"...that is for book clubs. We study the past to redeem its promise while disentangling crimes and errors.
Having now read it I believe that it deserves great acclaim because it supplies a serious lack and is satisfying in precisely the sense that most treatments of these events are dissatisfying.
He delivers on the war cry of his essay Albigenses in the Antipodes by rescuing the history of this crusade from what he calls "Intellectualist Bias", which he bitingly describes as the tendency to view human societies as "mise en scenes" for the literary record. Pegg, like not a few strong Australian academic, has been "brain drained" to the US.
I was disgusted by Sumption's treatment of the same subject.
We have enabled and done homage the Dominican Inquisitors and to the ultramontane papacy by lazily accepting their version of this crusade for centuries. As Pegg and quite a few other historians have pointed out, the annalles school of history, and Le Roy Ladurie specifically muddied our understanding by completely skirting the political dimensions of an episode which is explicitly and obviously political. What a boon to the perpetrators of state crime!
I see that not a few Catholics are offended by the naked opportunism of this "crusade" as depicted in Pegg's account, but those people have already decided to make one of history's more fecal discharges part of their steady spiritual diet!
As Adorno said...we do not want to curate the past ...history is not "remembrance"...that is for book clubs. We study the past to redeem its promise while disentangling crimes and errors.
June 22, 2009
Actually I didn't finish this book ... I didn't even get halfway through it. If you're looking for extremely well-researched, detailed information, this is the book. I wanted the information, but not in such a long, drawn-out textbook style!
Pretty fascinating, though, to find out that there was no official "Cathar" religion or group -- the 'heretics' the church exterminated were primarily different groups, the largest of which seems to have been the "Bon Chretians" -- commonly referred to as the Good Men, Good Women, Good Christians for their practice of living and behaving as Jesus.
These religious followers were not confined to the Langue d'Oc region (Occitania) of what is now southern France; they also lived in northern Italy, Catalonia, Germany and related areas.
Pretty fascinating, though, to find out that there was no official "Cathar" religion or group -- the 'heretics' the church exterminated were primarily different groups, the largest of which seems to have been the "Bon Chretians" -- commonly referred to as the Good Men, Good Women, Good Christians for their practice of living and behaving as Jesus.
These religious followers were not confined to the Langue d'Oc region (Occitania) of what is now southern France; they also lived in northern Italy, Catalonia, Germany and related areas.
August 25, 2013
The topic is an often overplayed epic of history, having been infused with a mystery (in part by Dan Brown) that was just lacking at the time it all went down. It's a complicated time in history and the author does a decent job of keeping things straight. It's nonetheless confusing at points.
April 14, 2023
In 1209 Pope Innocent III launched a crusade against the Cathars (from the Greek word for “pure”), a Christian sect inhabiting the Languedoc region of southern France. They were a uniquely tolerant and peaceful people whose heretical doctrines, the pope believed, threatened the very existence of the Christian faith. And, argues Mark Gregory Pegg - sometimes with excessive vehemence – the Cathars never existed.
That the Catholic Church launched a bloody war against perceived heretics in southern France is not contested, nor is the general magnitude of the ensuing slaughter, numbering in the tens of thousands. The Cathars (or, more neutrally, the Albigensians) were dualists (believing in two gods, good and evil) and anti-clericals (rejecting the need for clerical intercession between God and believer).
While the first heresy directly contradicted the doctrine of monotheism, one supposes it is the second that frightened church officials more. Yet these heresies were hardly unique in Europe, nor was frustration with a church that promised much and delivered little. So why did Innocent III single out the Albigensians for massive retribution?
Pegg never specifically answers this question, a forgivable omission given the limited documentary evidence available. But he scatters some clues. The Albigensians’ urbanized culture and tolerant nature (especially toward the Jews) marked them out as different at a time in European history when being different was exceptionally dangerous. Their location exacerbated the risk; at the southern periphery of a French state more interested in confronting England, the Languedoc was one of the few places in western Europe the church could punish heresy at scale without enraging a powerful king.
Pegg spends much effort arguing that the “Cathars” are fictional creations of later observers, loosely based on the actual society of southern France in the early 13th Century, invented for use in modern day culture wars. While there is vigorous academic debate on this point, to the general reader these arguments seem a bit sterile. Suffice it to say that the Albigensian Crusade and the ensuing Inquisition extinguished a vibrant, fascinating society, to humanity’s cost.
That the Catholic Church launched a bloody war against perceived heretics in southern France is not contested, nor is the general magnitude of the ensuing slaughter, numbering in the tens of thousands. The Cathars (or, more neutrally, the Albigensians) were dualists (believing in two gods, good and evil) and anti-clericals (rejecting the need for clerical intercession between God and believer).
While the first heresy directly contradicted the doctrine of monotheism, one supposes it is the second that frightened church officials more. Yet these heresies were hardly unique in Europe, nor was frustration with a church that promised much and delivered little. So why did Innocent III single out the Albigensians for massive retribution?
Pegg never specifically answers this question, a forgivable omission given the limited documentary evidence available. But he scatters some clues. The Albigensians’ urbanized culture and tolerant nature (especially toward the Jews) marked them out as different at a time in European history when being different was exceptionally dangerous. Their location exacerbated the risk; at the southern periphery of a French state more interested in confronting England, the Languedoc was one of the few places in western Europe the church could punish heresy at scale without enraging a powerful king.
Pegg spends much effort arguing that the “Cathars” are fictional creations of later observers, loosely based on the actual society of southern France in the early 13th Century, invented for use in modern day culture wars. While there is vigorous academic debate on this point, to the general reader these arguments seem a bit sterile. Suffice it to say that the Albigensian Crusade and the ensuing Inquisition extinguished a vibrant, fascinating society, to humanity’s cost.
December 27, 2022
Pegg's A Most Holy War contains a twofold thesis: one, that the Albigensian Crusade transformed the nature of persecution against not just Christian heretics but Muslims and Jews, and two, that the Cathar church was not a discrete entity with set beliefs, but rather the heretics persecuted during the Albigensian Crusade were a loosely affiliated group of laypeople with unorthodox societal organization. The first thesis isn't proved especially well, especially with regards to Muslims and Jews. The second thesis is fairly well demonstrated through Pegg's use of primary sources, though it's a little hard to evaluate some of his claims because he doesn't engage much with contrary historiography. As someone who was new to the Albigensian Crusade specifically, though not the subject of crusading in general, it was a little hard to evaluate his claims because I didn't have a strong sense of what he was arguing against. Thus as a rhetorical argument there's something to be desired.
As a standalone piece A Most Holy War is not particularly approachable. There is an enormous wealth of information in the text, but Pegg's organization is sometimes hard to understand and there's the problem of not being completely aware of prior arguments. Pegg's vocabulary is advanced, and he seems to prefer using more obscure terminology whenever possible; e.g. I'm not sure why "chiliastic" serves better than "millenarian" but Pegg prefers the former in a way nothing else I've read ever has. That's not necessarily a bad thing, and most terms are easy enough to glean from context, but it can be frustrating when it isn't specialized terminology. That said, Pegg's writing is otherwise vivid and powerful. I didn't find Pegg's theses particularly compelling, but the argument he makes for cultural genocide is powerful and chilling.
Overall I'd argue that Pegg's writing is good if challenging, his scholarship is extensive, and his argument leaves some things to be desired. This isn't the kind of history I'd pick up casually, but it's rewarding in its own way.
As a standalone piece A Most Holy War is not particularly approachable. There is an enormous wealth of information in the text, but Pegg's organization is sometimes hard to understand and there's the problem of not being completely aware of prior arguments. Pegg's vocabulary is advanced, and he seems to prefer using more obscure terminology whenever possible; e.g. I'm not sure why "chiliastic" serves better than "millenarian" but Pegg prefers the former in a way nothing else I've read ever has. That's not necessarily a bad thing, and most terms are easy enough to glean from context, but it can be frustrating when it isn't specialized terminology. That said, Pegg's writing is otherwise vivid and powerful. I didn't find Pegg's theses particularly compelling, but the argument he makes for cultural genocide is powerful and chilling.
Overall I'd argue that Pegg's writing is good if challenging, his scholarship is extensive, and his argument leaves some things to be desired. This isn't the kind of history I'd pick up casually, but it's rewarding in its own way.
May 6, 2023
Mark Pegg's "A Most Holy War" provides a thorough analysis of the Albigensian Crusade and the complex factors that drove it. Pegg challenges commonly held beliefs about the reasons for the crusade, highlighting the role of political and economic factors in the conflict, as well as the malign influence of the popes and their Legates. It particularly skewers a lot of the tosh that has been peddled about the gnostic nature of the heresy and its antecedents.
The book feel dense at times, Pegg's insights into the inaccuracies surrounding the Cathars and the nuanced nature of the Crusade are well worth considering. Overall, "A Most Holy War" offers an important correction on this period of history and reclaims it from this conspiracy theorists waxing lyrical.
The book feel dense at times, Pegg's insights into the inaccuracies surrounding the Cathars and the nuanced nature of the Crusade are well worth considering. Overall, "A Most Holy War" offers an important correction on this period of history and reclaims it from this conspiracy theorists waxing lyrical.
July 28, 2011
Well what can I say, the Crusades have always fascinated me, and this book on the Albigensian Crusade was deeply affecting. For those of you not familiar with these Crusades they were against Christian Heretics in the area around Toulouse in the mid to late 12th century.
What makes the crusades so disturbing and the book such a fascinating read is that these crusades were the first time that a crusade was launched against Christians in Europe rather than focused on the holy land and the fight against Islam.
What I didn't know and I found very interesting in this book was the concept of "good men" and "good women" and the rituals and rules around "respect". To be honest, I'd probably have to read further to really understand in detail how the heretical community in the region actually functioned. What was clear was how their communal organization was threatening to the organised Church - apart from the obvious political context in which the whole enterprise was conducted.
The role played by and the fate of the Count of Toulouse is a fascinating aspect of this book. It makes you consider how the development of feudal society and its relationship with the church was grounded in what is essentially a mafia style heirarchy.
I highly recommend the book.
What makes the crusades so disturbing and the book such a fascinating read is that these crusades were the first time that a crusade was launched against Christians in Europe rather than focused on the holy land and the fight against Islam.
What I didn't know and I found very interesting in this book was the concept of "good men" and "good women" and the rituals and rules around "respect". To be honest, I'd probably have to read further to really understand in detail how the heretical community in the region actually functioned. What was clear was how their communal organization was threatening to the organised Church - apart from the obvious political context in which the whole enterprise was conducted.
The role played by and the fate of the Count of Toulouse is a fascinating aspect of this book. It makes you consider how the development of feudal society and its relationship with the church was grounded in what is essentially a mafia style heirarchy.
I highly recommend the book.
December 5, 2019
Hard to know how to review this one. 3.5 stars? The author takes issue with what he considers a lot of poor scholarship out there on Catharism - rightly so, I should think -and is writing in reaction to this. He's done an impressive amount of original source research, and comes up with a different view on who the "heretics" of Occitania were. This was fascinating, but I wish had been further developed and more clearly so. This initial section is a bit dense and confusing. The rest of the book follows the playing out of the actual crusade over many years. The writing becomes clearer - actually he's a wonderful writer. It does rather go on, but then that's because the crusade rather went on, one battle/siege after another for unbelievably long. There's unfathomable amounts of unfathomable and horrific brutality ...but written about rather beautifully. (What does one do with that?) It left me a bit reeling, but I learned a good deal about the Albigensian crusade, from someone who's done their solid research. Sometimes the author lets his passion get the better of him, and can veer into ranting where more clearly explicated thoughts would have been helpful. Apparently he has written another book on the inquisition following the crusade, and perhaps that more fully develops his thoughts on who the "heretics" actually were - I don't know.
October 7, 2012
A Most Holy War covers the Albigensian Crusade which was the first Crusade against another Catholic group. Pope Innocent III accused a count of Toulouse France (Raimon VI) of killing a papal legate. He called upon all Christians to fight the count and wipe out his heretics across Southern France. The war which carried on for twenty years is told in exquisite if not horrific detail of atrocities carried out on both sides in the name of God. Eyewitness accounts and firsthand stories put a very human face on the war and detail the horrific nature of Crusade warfare where combatants are promised absolution for sins in battle. Mark Pegg shows that this war was about a traditional medieval Christian belief in Crusades and not about exterminating the Cathars which had not formed at this time. The battles are detailed very well and plentiful maps are provided. It is easy to get lost with the participants so the list of people at the front I found to be a useful reference point. Overall a very interesting addition to the literature of the Crusades and a fresh perspective on something that many historians have distorted for one view or another. Overall well worth the time for those interested in the medieval time period or Christian religious history.
October 29, 2015
Brief account of the Crusades in southern France in the 13th century. Good mix of talking about the practices of the so called Cathars, and the various Dukes and Kings who exploited the Pope's call for religious war.
Read
October 15, 2009This is one man's perspective on the Albigensian Crusade. I just started it. This is for research purposes for my own writing.
February 21, 2009
Informative and useful, but densely written and dry, considering the dramatic story it tries to tell.
Read
July 20, 2012I have tried to read this several times. The subject interests me but this is not a style that I can appreciate. I was looking for a narrative not a textbook.
September 8, 2014
Fascinating narrative history of the Albigensian crusade. Generous in the inclusion of source material, it makes for very grim reading.
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