The Cathars (from the ancient Greek katharoi, "the pure ones") were a medieval religious movement of Christian Gnosticism, active from the 11th to 14th centuries around Southern Europe, particularly southern France and northwestern Italy. Considered a vital part of the community in those regions, the Cathars drew the ire of the Catholic Church and Ottoman Empire, which saw them as competition for both religious and political reasons, leading to their extermination.
The origin of this movement remains unknown, although it has been traditionally tied to the Bogomils, a 10th century Gnostic sect from the Bulgarian Empire founded by a preacher who called himself Bogomil ("Bogomil" is a Slavic term meaning "dear to God"). The Bogomils were social anarchists who rejected regular Christian teachings and replaced them with a creation myth of moderate dualism. According to their doctrine, God had two sons, Sataniel and Michael; the former revolted and created the material world as a prison, enslaving mankind there and founding the Abrahamic religions out of arrogance, while the latter took the guise of Jesus and came to the world to teach humans the way to escape. Bogomils were deeply social, rejecting the cross, any religious hierarchy beyond the rank of teacher, and any temple beyond the human body, which meant it was their duty to travel far and wide to preach and heal the sick. Bogomilism was eradicated in the 13th century by both the Pope and the Orthodox Church, but they had time to influence religious thought in the south of France and Italy, giving birth to Catharism.
Cathar beliefs, and the main source of differentiation from Catholicism, were basically a modernized version of the Gnostic butter and bread as seen by Bogomils. They believed the cosmos was ruled by two forces, the true God or "Invisible Father" and an evil deity named "King of the World"note , the latter of which was either identified with Satan or considered his father, creator or corrupter. The material world was a corrupt prison created by Satan, who had warred against God, while humans were actually angelic spiritsnote deceived into leaving God's heaven and inhabiting bodies of flesh. Trapped in matter, the human souls would be forever condemned to suffer under Satan and his whims, reincarnating over and over upon dying without hope to escape. Fortunately for us, the ever cool Jesus had been sent by God to save humans by teaching them the true divine teachings, which would allow us to return to heaven by renunciating the material world and practicing ascetism and celibacy.
Contrary to what is often implied, Catharism was not a strongly organized religion, but a myriad of regional factions that only shared a few central ideological pillars, sometimes varying wildly in the rest of their teachings. They didn't even have a real collective name; they only saw themselves as Christians, the "true" kind of Christianity which had not been tainted by the devil, and therefore they only called themselves "Good Men" or "Good Christians". Catharism was a label given to them by chroniclers, who also called them Albigensis after the city Albi where the movement first took hold. That said, they shared some ranks and sacraments, and it's apparent at some point they formed their own ecumenical council of bishops, which was joined by Bogomil representatives.
The basic structure divided adherents into "believers" (credentes), the rank-and-file members, and "perfects" (parfaits), the ascetic spiritual elite. The perfects were set apart via the consolamentum, a sacrament equivalent to baptism in which other perfects laid hands on the head of an initiate, which they believed transmitted the holy spirit to them. While the intense demands of being a parfait (including frequent periods of fasting) may have had limited appeal, the credentes were likely drawn to Catharism because it offered a pre-Protestant alternative to Catholicism, as well as a theology that essentially tossed out the idea of Hell and eternal punishment; whatever sins you committed were the result of your disgraceful material body being part of a fallen imperfect world, and after death you either got reincarnated or, if you had the consolamentum, returned to Heaven (the credentes generally received the consolamentum on their deathbed).
Thanks to the admiration they caused in peasant and nobles alike for their sobriety, especially compared to the scandalous and dissolute lifestyles of the Catholic clergy, Cathars became highly influential in France and amassed a huge amount of wealth, castles, and prestige, which eventually made the Church feel threatened. When Pope Innocent III realized retaking the spiritual control of the region was impossible, and after the murder of the papal legate (likely for having insulted a powerful Cathar noble), he requested military action and proclaimed the Albigensian Crusade, the usual campaign of massacre and forceful re-conversion. Although Christianity had already their hands busy with the Fifth and Sixth Crusades, King Philip II eventually saw this as a great chance to reassess his political authority over the unruly Languedoc, and when the Pope promised the heretics' lands to all noblemen who joined the fight, the Cathars' fate was decided. The conflict also saw the creation of the Dominican Order and the Medieval Inquisition to help eradicate the heresy.
The Cathars were ultimately defeated with devastating consequences, leading historians to call it a literal genocide. The phrase "Kill them all and let God sort them out" originated as the instruction that Arnaud Amalric, the abbot who commanded the crusader army besieging the Cathar stronghold of Béziers, allegedly gave when asked how his troops should try to tell Cathars apart from Catholics (the original quote, Caedite eos, novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius, was more formal and slyly alluded to 2 Timothy 2:19, if still awful). The Inquisition worked on destroying the rebels' ideology until much of the 14th century, punishing with tortures and penitency those Cathars who repented, and burning at the stake those who did not. Indeed, the image of Cathars voluntarily climbing into the fires and perishing while chanting hymns pervaded the time's chronicles. The results were bitter for the winning side too, though, as the conflict had empowered the French crown to the point that the Papacy became dependent on it, which ended up causing the Avignon Papacy, and also heavily decreased the support they all could give to the true Crusades at the time, ultimately leading to their failure.
The legacy of Catharism has endured, spurred on by the preservation of various Cathar-related ruins in Languedoc, and the fact that almost all the historical records of the Cathars were produced by their Catholic opponents, so little is truly known about them for certain. As a result, they are heavily Shrouded in Myth, subject to countless speculations and a popular ingredient in various supposed historical conspiracies. On one hand, they're a fountain of legends, spawning theories that they were in possession of the Holy Grail and other conspiracies. On the other hand, a vocal minority of academics have begun to suggest that the Cathar movement didn't even exist—that is, Rome spun reports of a few small localized heretical groups (or even lied from the beginning to the end about the existence of those groups) into a vast movement to justify a crusade. As you can see, the Cathars are a major topic of heated debate among medieval historians. They're also a point of attraction for their home region in France, which proudly bills itself as Pays Cathare ("Cathar Country").
Cathars in media:
- Les Cathares, a 1966 French miniseries.
- In Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, Cathars are claimed to be secret custodians of the bloodline of Jesus and Mary Magdalene — something whose sole concept, ironically, would have infuriated true Cathars.
- Legacy of the Cathars, the first novel of the Damné series by French-speaking Canadian author Hervé Gagnon.
