A Template for Modern Oppression

“The French monarchy waged an infamous war of extermination against Christian heretics during the 13th century. The Albigensian crusade was a landmark in the development of an oppressive European social order with crucial legacies for the world today”

“The ideologies that took shape to legitimize medieval oppression later supplied a template for new systems of class domination in the modern capitalist world.”

“Pope Innocent III called the Albigensian crusade in 1208. Crusades were holy wars instigated by the papacy to be fought by secular recruits. They were initially directed specifically against Muslims in Palestine and Spain but became a way in which popes could attempt to mobilize secular troops against a range of papal enemies”

“The sack of Béziers gave rise to a notorious anecdote about the man who was then leading the crusade, Arnaud Amaury, Abbot of Cîteaux. One of the knights was said to have asked Amaury how they could distinguish orthodox Béziers citizens from the heretical ones, to which he replied: “Kill them all — God will know his own.””

“The combined effect of royal and religious rule in Languedoc was considerable. People in Languedoc still perceived themselves to be under foreign occupation well into the fourteenth century, when one of their spokesmen told King Philip IV of France that it was a wonder that the whole land did not tell him, “go away, foreigner.””

“A Marxist interpretation of heresy and the crusade, however, can show that it was of considerable importance in the development of feudalism and of oppression as a ruling-class tactic to increase feudal control. We can thus properly view the Albigensian crusade as part of the history of class struggle”

“In terms of political history, the Albigensian crusade marks the point at which the south of France became definitively part of France, rather than a trans-Pyrenean kingdom made up of Aragon, Catalonia, and Languedoc. In order to understand its wider significance, however, we need to grasp the nature of heresy”

“We can observe the reality of heresy as social protest in the careers of twelfth-century “heretics” like Arnold of Brescia in Rome and William Longbeard in London, two holy men who led class-based revolts, and Éon de l’Étoile, a Breton peasant rebel who believed he was divinely inspired to raid churches and monasteries”

“The traditional historiographical view of the issue of heresy in Languedoc sees it as approaching the formation of an alternative Church. According to this version, Catharism was imported to Western Europe from Bulgaria, where there was a heretical Christian tendency known as Bogomilism. With its dualist belief in two Gods, the good God of Heaven and the evil God of this world, it differed so fundamentally from orthodox Christianity that it was effectively a different religion.”

“However, there is an alternative view that notes there is very little hard evidence for the existence of organized dualism in the south of France. Far from the region being a center of Catharism, the term “Cathar” was never actually used in Languedoc, where heretics were more usually referred to as “good men” and “good women” or (by the Inquisition) as “followers of the heretical depravity.””

“Languedoc in the twelfth century was an area in which feudal control was weak. While this did not mean that it was outside the feudal system altogether, the nobility of the area often exercised real exploitative power over a surprisingly small percentage of the lands they nominally controlled. There were multiple examples of towns and villages behaving as if they were effectively independent, from the commune of Toulouse expelling its count from the city and conducting its own wars, to the small town of Limoux quietly relocating itself at will.”

“The historian R. I. Moore developed the concept of the persecuting society, noting that the later eleventh and twelfth centuries saw deliberate violence beginning to be directed through state and religious institutions against people who were part of “out-groups”: Jews, lepers, heretics, and so on”

“This was not because these groups became objectively larger, and nor did it reflect a growth in individual bigotry: rather, it was the product of a ruling-class strategy aimed at increasing elite power and authority”