I read it, but I didn't see any death toll count, you claimed "killed several hundred thousand cathars in a twenty year long crusade."
The Crusades (split off)
- Thread starter Racsoviale
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I read it, but I didn't see any death toll count, you claimed "killed several hundred thousand cathars in a twenty year long crusade."
Torgny
Warlord
It is difficult to know exactly how many people were killed during this long war. No government officials were there to count the bodies. The papal legate Arnaud wrote to Pope Innocent III after the crusaders had taken the town of Béziers, "Today your Holiness, twenty thousand heretics were put to the sword, regardless of rank, age, or sex." Even if was only 10.000 people killed, it would be a lot. If this was what happened in one town, and the war went on for many years, it seams like hundred of thousands killed instead of thousands would be realistic.
You can read more about this under the headline Massacre in the link below. This link informs of several cruelties. It was also at this time the inquisition started, the inquisition started not against Jews or Muslims, but against the Christian cathars! Yes, an apology from the Catholic church today would be appreciated.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catharism
You can read more about this under the headline Massacre in the link below. This link informs of several cruelties. It was also at this time the inquisition started, the inquisition started not against Jews or Muslims, but against the Christian cathars! Yes, an apology from the Catholic church today would be appreciated.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catharism
LightSpectra
me autem minui
The Albigensians were not just religious dissenters; they were also political rebels, and their actions in Spain and France were akin to a civil war. Attempting to portray the Albigensian Crusade as intolerant Catholics abusing their power is so far off that I hardly have the willpower to talk about it.
Citing Wikipedia articles doesn't tell me much because most of the Wikipedia articles about religion in the middle ages are either of terrible quality, or heavily edited by me.
Citing Wikipedia articles doesn't tell me much because most of the Wikipedia articles about religion in the middle ages are either of terrible quality, or heavily edited by me.
Torgny
Warlord
The cathar priests were pacifists, not allowed to kill or to wear weapons. The cathars did not believe in blind obedience to Rome or to local priests. This might have made pope Innocent III furious. Can you describe what you mean by “they were also political rebels, and their actions in Spain and France were akin to a civil war.”
LightSpectra
me autem minui
k. What about the rest of them?
Neither do Catholics. Not that this is remotely relevant.
The Cathars are comparable the Confederate States of America; not only did they have ideological differences, but engaged in a full political-military split from their home countries, and proceeded to use their military power to enforce their unlawful secession.
Torgny
Warlord
LightSpectra
me autem minui
The crusaders were certainly guilty of the same cruelties that the Cathars were. Are you aware that what generated the outrage that lead to the crusade in the first place was the murder of the Catholic ambassador to Languedoc, Pierre de Castelnau?
Yes, you do. The Spanish Inquisition was not under the control of the Catholic Church but the Spanish monarchs. Several Popes (off of the top of my head; Sixtus IV and Innocent VIII) condemned the violent ways of the Spanish Inquisition but had not the political means in which to dismantle it.
I didn't say the Cathars had slaves.
I have no intent on white washing the sins of Catholics throughout history, but attempting to paint the Albigensian Crusade as you have throughout this thread is pretty absurd.
The Papal Legate was murdered, this was what forced the Pope's hand
"time when there was much cruelty"
"most of southern France was cathar"
[citation needed]
Define "a lot"
LightSpectra and I both know a bit about the Inquisition(s)
LightSpectra didn't say the Cathars had slaves, he said "not only did they have ideological differences, but engaged in a full political-military split from their home countries, and proceeded to use their military power to enforce their unlawful secession," there are no references to slavery anywhere in it.
The Catholic Church is a hospital for sinners and is composed of *gasp* sinners, who *gasp* sin. Sometimes the sinners manage to worm their way up the ranks and other times people succumb to excessive zealotry. Their actions hurt us deeper than many can understand. If you looks at the good and bad deeds done by the people in the Church you will see that the good far outshines the bad.
Torgny
Warlord
Torgny
Warlord
Envoys of peace getting murdered never improves the situation because it forces the hand.
The Catholic Church did not run the Spanish Inquisition, it was run by the Spanish monarchy whom the Papacy repeatedly pleaded with to end it.
His comparison wasn't about slavery
Did you really just link me an article from 1961 on the Cathars? That's almost as bad as giving me an article from 1871 about the Middle Ages. New organizations should stick to news because that is what they are qualified to do!
1,000,000 is the absolute maximum not even close to a normal estimate.
Those who repented were spared, as were the ones who weren't heretics
You do realize that every major religion has done this right? And atheism too (by the Soviets)!
The Times should stick to what they can do competently, and indeed they mostly have in the almost 50 years since the article was published
Torgny
Warlord
This is the end of the discussion. You do not answer my questions. I ask for citations of what you say, and you give me none.
Do you by this sentence say that it was right by the Catholic church to kill, torture and burning at stake those who hold on to their cathar beliefs??????
If you both know a lot about the inquisition, why do you all the time repeat about the Spanish inquisition? Do you not know that the Catholic church started the inquisition long before that, against the cathars many years earlier (according to the Catholic church itself)?
From my perspective murder is wrong, torture is wrong, burning people who are pacifists at the stake is wrong. And it is even more wrong when it is done by a Church that was told by its founder love one another.
Do you by this sentence say that it was right by the Catholic church to kill, torture and burning at stake those who hold on to their cathar beliefs??????
If you both know a lot about the inquisition, why do you all the time repeat about the Spanish inquisition? Do you not know that the Catholic church started the inquisition long before that, against the cathars many years earlier (according to the Catholic church itself)?
From my perspective murder is wrong, torture is wrong, burning people who are pacifists at the stake is wrong. And it is even more wrong when it is done by a Church that was told by its founder love one another.
Actually, it was a combination of that murder in the context of the legate investigating the heresy in the first place and Raymond de Toulouse's non-cooperation beforehand that induced the interdict.
How that snowballed into a sort of crusade had a great deal to do with contingency. The sack of Béziers was a usual sack in that it was motivated less by a "we must kill the evil heretics" mindset than a fair amount of spur-of-the-moment emotion and pent-up anger at being forced to storm the place at all. After that, the development of the crusade was almost wholly out of the Church hierarchy's hands; it passed to Simon de Montfort, who basically turned the whole thing into a personal struggle to gain land, wealth, and power in southern France and to destroy anybody who betrayed him (a frequent occurrence among the Occitan nobles, who by and large seem to have regarded most agreements as only lasting until the handshake ended).
In general, the Albigensian crusade, while certainly part of the crusading phenomenon, would be better characterized as a political-military struggle by first Simon and then the Capetian kings to exert control over southern France, rather than the ludicrous image of a genocidal war against the innocent free-thinking Cathars. For the most concise statements of this, see Marvin (2008) and sections of Tyerman (2006).
Torgny
Warlord
This crusade was started by pope Innocent III and the king of France. French aristocrats from the north were told that they would have lands in the south if they participated in this holy war. Pope Innocent III started a crusade against other Christians!
How anyone can defend the Catholic church in this crusade is for me unbelievable. Blaming French aristocrats that were blessed by the church in the first place. The pope sent battle-hardened veterans into this crusade. He knew what this meant for the civilian population. The inquisition was started during this war by the Catholic church. The inquisition continued during this war. The pope could have stopped supporting the crusade if he believed that the war had gone out of control. He never tried to stop this war. Instead he started the inquisition.
If people want to make excuses for what the Catholic church did in the past. If people make excuses for the Catholic church starting a war against fellow Christians, whose priests were not even allowed to carry weapons. If people make excuses for the killing, torturing, burning people at the stake, they are free to do so. From my perspective torture, murder and killing innocent people is always wrong.
I'd take you a lot more seriously if your posts didn't consist of the same few poorly spelled and organized talking points, repeated over and over with little regard for anything anybody else had said. And I have even more contempt for the Papists (and less interest in making excuses for them) than you do. At least you aren't blatantly making up numbers like "several hundred thousand dead" like you had been.
As for the substantive stuff in there, of which there is rather little...you're harping about how the crusade was directed against "fellow Christians". The Cathars are usually called Christians, yes, but their particular brand of heresy was so far removed from the rest of Christianity that virtually nobody had practiced anything similar for the past thousand-odd years. They had very little in common with much of Catholic doctrine, a far greater gulf than the one that opened up later between the Protestant denominations and Catholicism. And a very large part of that was as a political strategy by Occitan nobility to differentiate themselves from their neighbors. I'm not sure where your outrage is coming from, honestly. What made a crusade against Cathars worse than a crusade against Muslims or a crusade against Orthodoxals or a crusade against the Holy Roman Emperor? And to whom, exactly, is the Roman Catholic Church supposed to apologize?
You seem to be badly confused as to the whole timeline of events, too. You seem to have the odd idea that either the same Pope was directing things the whole time (not true) or that all relevant Popes held the same beliefs about what the crusade was supposed to accomplish and how (also not true). You appear to believe that just throwing the word "inquisition" around is supposed to prove something about how vile the events actually were, and ignore any attempts to talk about how the Cathars were actually treated more leniently than, say, Catalan mercenaries (Cathars subjected to the inquisition generally were able to defend themselves in a trial of sorts, and even if convicted their punishment was usually not that severe, whereas mercenaries, as was somewhat customary at the time, were put to death if they were captured). It's really pretty perplexing.
As for the substantive stuff in there, of which there is rather little...you're harping about how the crusade was directed against "fellow Christians". The Cathars are usually called Christians, yes, but their particular brand of heresy was so far removed from the rest of Christianity that virtually nobody had practiced anything similar for the past thousand-odd years. They had very little in common with much of Catholic doctrine, a far greater gulf than the one that opened up later between the Protestant denominations and Catholicism. And a very large part of that was as a political strategy by Occitan nobility to differentiate themselves from their neighbors. I'm not sure where your outrage is coming from, honestly. What made a crusade against Cathars worse than a crusade against Muslims or a crusade against Orthodoxals or a crusade against the Holy Roman Emperor? And to whom, exactly, is the Roman Catholic Church supposed to apologize?
You seem to be badly confused as to the whole timeline of events, too. You seem to have the odd idea that either the same Pope was directing things the whole time (not true) or that all relevant Popes held the same beliefs about what the crusade was supposed to accomplish and how (also not true). You appear to believe that just throwing the word "inquisition" around is supposed to prove something about how vile the events actually were, and ignore any attempts to talk about how the Cathars were actually treated more leniently than, say, Catalan mercenaries (Cathars subjected to the inquisition generally were able to defend themselves in a trial of sorts, and even if convicted their punishment was usually not that severe, whereas mercenaries, as was somewhat customary at the time, were put to death if they were captured). It's really pretty perplexing.
On the Inquisition: Torgny is obviously right to distinguish between the inquisition itself and the Spanish Inquisition (which was later); however, the inquisition was not, as a rule, the bloody and unjust instrument of popular culture. At the time in question it wasn't exactly a hard-and-fast institution. Rather, there were particular individuals who were given powers as "inquisitors" and who went around, well, inquisiting. They were mostly Dominican friars and they were mostly extremely conscientious people who did not, as a rule, spend their time torturing people to death on whims. The inquisition scenes in The name of the rose are really a caricature. So just saying "they started the inquisition" as if that's self-evidently bad is not a very convincing argument.
On Galileo, he was indeed his own worst enemy. It is important to remember that he was condemned not for his belief in heliocentrism but for his insistence that heliocentrism was literally true and could be proved to be literally true. Most people at the time regarded scientific theories as predictive models, not as literal truth (and indeed many scientists to day have the same view). It was Galileo's insistence that in fact his theory could be proved to be true - not to mention his ridiculous of the Pope in his published works - that landed him in hot water. Ironically, of course, Galileo's purported proof of heliocentrism - which revolved around the claim that the tides of the sea are caused by the water sloshing around as the earth wheels around the sun - was complete rubbish. What any of this has to do with the inquisition or the Albigensian crusade is, naturally, quite beyond me.
On Galileo, he was indeed his own worst enemy. It is important to remember that he was condemned not for his belief in heliocentrism but for his insistence that heliocentrism was literally true and could be proved to be literally true. Most people at the time regarded scientific theories as predictive models, not as literal truth (and indeed many scientists to day have the same view). It was Galileo's insistence that in fact his theory could be proved to be true - not to mention his ridiculous of the Pope in his published works - that landed him in hot water. Ironically, of course, Galileo's purported proof of heliocentrism - which revolved around the claim that the tides of the sea are caused by the water sloshing around as the earth wheels around the sun - was complete rubbish. What any of this has to do with the inquisition or the Albigensian crusade is, naturally, quite beyond me.
Torgny seems to be appalled at the concept of freedom of religion not existing as if it is something so obvious.
Even better Galileo's sloshing idea allowed only one tide per day, which was ridiculed and of course the fatal flaw, the lack of stellar parallax proof.
I think he's trying to use the Galileo trials as proof of the Catholic Church persecuting the truth because it didn't agree with what they taught
LightSpectra
me autem minui
I'm starting to like these religion trolls. It's making the respectable posters inadvertently become Papists.
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