The Cathar Consolamentum

6 months ago
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Mirrored: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHSl_3-aLPI&lc=UgzQ9xxejneN__Pj1ld4AaABAg.A3wlublLVfZA3ziUVXnEUI

A Five-Minute Guide to the Cathars
They were subject to an official crusade, and effectively wiped out.

Although Catharism was decried as heresy in the twelfth century, it was in the early thirteenth century that Innocent III took the church’s rejection of Catharism to its most extreme. Now called the Albigensian Crusade (after the city of Albi, which was a target), the crusade against the Cathars was as brutal and bloody as the crusades in the Middle East – in fact, Innocent made this comparison explicit when he targeted them. Thousands of men, women, and children were slaughtered or burned as heretics in a bloodbath that officially lasted from 1209-1229, but unofficially continued until Catharism was effectively obliterated by the end of the century.

In perhaps the most brutal episode, the city of Béziers was besieged and sacked for refusing to surrender its Cathar citizens. It’s said that the papal legate told the crusaders: “Kill them all. God will recognize his own.” Somewhere between 9,000-20,000 citizens, Catholic and Cathar alike, were killed. The persecution of the Cathars was preached, among others, by St. Dominic, whose followers (the Dominican friars) would be frequently called upon to be the church’s inquisitors in heresy trials for centuries to follow. Some historians have set the total figure of Cathars killed over time at approximately one million.
https://www.medievalists.net/2020/04/guide-cathars/

Cathar Texts: Interrogatio Johannis (The Book of John the Evangelist)http://www.gnosis.org/library/Interrogatio_Johannis.html

The Cathars
https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/esp_cataros.htm

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