Catharism
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Catharism was a name given to a religious sect with gnostic elements that appeared in the Languedoc region of France in the 11th Century and flourished in the 12th and 13th Centuries. Catharism had its roots in the Paulician movement in Armenia and was also influenced by the Bogomiles with whom the Paulicians eventually merged. They also became influenced by dualist and perhaps Manichaean beliefs.
Like many medieval movements, there were various schools of thought and practice amongst the Cathari; some were dualistic, other gnostic, some closer to orthodoxy while abstaining from an acceptance of Roman Catholic doctrines. The dualist theology was the most prominent, however, and held that the physical world was evil and created by Satan, who was taken to be identical with the God of the Old Testament; and that men underwent a series of reincarnations before reaching the pure realm of spirit, the presence of the God of Love described in the New Testament and his messenger Jesus.
The Roman Catholic Church regarded the sect as heretical; faced with the rapid spread of the movement across the Languedoc and the failure of peaceful attempts at conversion, the Church launched the Albigensian Crusade to crush the movement.
Massacre
From May 1243 to March 1244, the Cathar fortress of Montségur was besieged by the troops of the seneschal of Carcassonne and the archbishop of Narbonne. On March 16, 1244 a large and symbolically important massacre took place, where over 200 Cathar perfects were burned in an enormous fire at the prat des cramats near the foot of the castle. Moreover, the Church decreed chastisements against laymen suspected of sympathy with Cathars (Council of Narbonne, 1235; see the Bulla of Innocent IV Ad exstirpanda, 1252).
[[Image:CatharCross.JPG|right|framed| Inquisitors required heretical sympathisers - repentant first offenders - to sew a yellow cross onto their clothes.
