The Origins of Heresy

My name is John Arnold.

I'm professor of mediaeval history at the University of Cambridge.

The sequence of lectures is about mediaeval church and mediaeval heresy.

In the year 12 09,

a huge band of armed crusaders mostly made up of northern French knights

led by a papal Leggett called Arnold Emery

and another particular night called Simon de Montfort

swept through the south of France, capturing cities,

burning castles and executing people as they went

on the 22nd of July. In that year,

they arrived at the city of busier

Arnold.

Memory was asked by the soldiers what they should do to distinguish the heretics

that they were trying to eradicate from the south,

from the good Catholics who were surely part of the citizenry.

How are they to tell which were which in the city that they were besieging?

And Leymarie gave his reply.

Kill them all. God will know his own

that at least as alleged by a later chronicler on those events.

Whether it's exactly what Emery said or not,

we do know that the easier to a huge massacre

took place one of the bloodiest of the campaign.

These battles, known as the al B gentian crusades.

Later, historians carried on for another 20 years

an attempt by the church to bring the south of France to heal

and to eradicate a group of heretics that modern historians usually call Cath ours.

How did things come to this very violent pass?

Such that crusade was proclaimed against Christian

lands within Europe for the first time.

In order to understand that,

we need to look more generally at how

the church understood mediaeval heresy about events that led

to the calling of crusade.

And we need to understand also that in some large degree,

the crusade was completely ineffective against its stated target.

As we do this,

we're trying to understand the dynamic between orthodoxy and heresy,

what heresy actually mean and meant in the period.

And we could be asking ourselves what kind of

change might have been going on in mediaeval society,

such that persecution of heretics,

along with persecution of certain other groups, became perhaps the norm.

To understand mediaeval heresy.

We need to go back a bit earlier in time to the 11th century.

Since the fall of Rome in the early

earliest period of the Middle Ages,

there have been almost no mention of heresy until we get to the early 11th century.

What is heresy?

Heresy means essentially a Christian belief that diverges from

what the Chart church declares to be orthodox.

This doesn't mean that nobody before the

11th century believe differently from the church.

But it does mean that there was no popular movement.

There is no moment at which large groups of people were all inspired

to believe something other

than the version of Christianity presented by the church.

It's important to remember that the point about

heresy is that it is still Christian.

If you were a Jew or if you were a Muslim, you were not a heretic.

You were of a different law, a different faith in that period,

so heretics were paradoxically, always.

Christians understood themselves to be Christians and laid claim to that,

but was seen as the wrong version of Christianity,

a misunderstanding and misinterpretation

by the church.

So in the early 11th century,

we find a few mentions of groups of people who diverged from orthodoxy in this way.

For example, the Chronicle tells us about a peasant called little

in the north of France,

who said that Nobody had to pay tithes to the church tides being the finances,

financial

contribution that everyone was supposed to make,

that the image of the cross shouldn't be worshipped at all

and various other radical ideas.

The only evidence we have of Leutar is one Chronicle account,

and it simply says that he inspired lots of people to this.

This craziness, until he then

suffering from madness, threw himself down a well to his death.

Most of the 11th century stories are these rather

fanciful kinds where it's very difficult to tell,

if anything, much of what was really going on behind it.

But it gives us an idea of perhaps

a period in which some ordinary people were questioning

some versions of Christianity that they were being taught.

And as importantly, it gives us the impression

that some Orthodox authorities, usually local bishops,

were becoming concerned about other people's views of Christianity

in the early 12th century.

We find yet more of these figures and

particularly we find them associated with a sort

of inspired idea of going back to the Gospels and living like the early apostles.

These figures particularly wanted to go out and preach to the world.

So we get people like Henry of Low Sane

and Peter of Brie,

who were inspired to adopt a

demonstrable cloak of poverty,

to go out and preach to the people about the need for spiritual reform

and very often then denounced the local clergy for being overly rich,

for being over endowed with goods and so on and so forth.

In these early 12th century case,

we can tell that the context for this was a wider movement of church reform.

And again, heresy is a form of Christianity.

So there were other people who were reformers who wanted

to change the nature of orthodoxy to something that they saw

more

inspired by the early Bible,

but some of whom stayed on the right side of

authority and others of whom fell out with that authority.

So a lot of what made you a heretic in the early 12th century was whether

or not the local bishop continued to think that you were a good thing or not.

All of this experience is meant that by the end of the 12th century, the church had

something of a legacy of thinking about heretics.

It had inherited a number of tools from late antiquity,

particularly Augustine of Hippo,

who right back in the early years of

the church had written a handbook against heresy,

called Day Horry's Abbas on the heretics.

That handbook told church people how to identify heretics and how

to see a variety of different groups they might come from.

That book was still being read 1000 years later,

and by the late 12th century Chroniclers had also

recorded a number of these outbreaks of popular.

Harris is perhaps over

overenthusiastic reformers.

What changed in the late 12th early 13th century

was the apparent emergence of an organised group.

Modern historians usually call them calf ours,

who believed a version of Christianity so radically different from Orthodoxy

that it couldn't be seen as reform.

The cath ours

seemed to believe in to God's not the one god of Christianity

to God's one of whom was the Good God who had

created the spirit and the heavens and all that was good

and a bad God who had created all physical existence.

So for the cath, ours, this world was hell.

This world we were already in was the worst it would get,

and the point of existence was to try to transcend to a more holy state of being

and join with the Good God.

We see the cathouse appearing in the north of Spain,

in the south of France in north Italy at some point in the late 12th century.

I'll come back to

these details in a later lecture.

It threatens the church hugely,

and it threatens them because these catheters seem

to have the support of the local nobility.

The church preaches against the heretics, tries to persuade people against them.

But in 12 oh eight,

a papal Leggett people of Castell now is murdered by nobles in the south of France,

and this triggers the pope innocent Third,

into calling a crusade against the South.

Thus the events of 12 oh nine,

which carry on for 20 years with a sort of

to and fro of towns and castles being captured,

recaptured

until eventually in the last years of the crusade,

the northern French monarchy joins in properly for the first time,

and the South politically surrenders.

That has very big implications for the politics of the south of France,

and it allowed the foundation of inquisition into heresy

as the next approach that the church took.

But as we shall see, all of this still remain complicated over how to deal with heresy

and questions of what the heresy actually was

continue

as well.