Albigenses

al-bi-jen sez, a religious sect of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. They opposed the teachings of the Church of Rome. Their principal center was Toulouse, in the south of France. Like other sects, they were seditious. Political hatred and desire for plunder were cloaked under the guise of zeal for religion. An armed crusade was ordered. "Slay all, God will know his own," was the war cry. They were suppressed by battle, conversion, inquisition, torture, and massacre. Forty thousand innocent and, in a way, inoffensive people, many of them Catholics, were killed in cold blood in a single campaign. The destruction of the sect does not appear to be other than one of those great catastrophes that happen without need and without any counterbalancing advantage to the world. See Huguenots; Lollards; Hussites

The Albigenses were the most formidable of several heretical sects produced in the twelfth century by a general social and religious discontent. All these movements seem to have drawn strength chiefly from popular feeling against the wealth and corruption of the higher clergy; and most of them quickly subsided when the church roused and reformed itself. But the Albigenses rejected important doctrines of the church, and soon came to rebel against its government. They had their home in Languedoc, or southeastern France, and in that region the dislike for the clergy became so intense that the old byword, "I had rather be a Jew," was exchanged for "I had rather be a priest." Popes and church councils made various ineffectual attempts to reclaim the heretics, and finally Innocent III proclaimed a holy war against them as "more wicked than Saracens." For a hundred years, popes had been preaching a war of the cross against the Mohammedans in Palestine: now a crusade was preached against a sect of Christian heretics. Raymond, the mighty County of Toulouse, tried to protect his subjects; but the feudal nobles of northern France rallied to the Pope's call. Besides the religious motive, these lords hated the rising democracy of southern city-France, and hungered for its rich plunder. A twenty-years' struggle, marked by ferocious massacres, exterminated the heretics and the rising prosperity of Languedoc.--West, Ancient World.

The Church of the Albigenses had been drowned in blood. These supposed heretics had been swept away from the soil of France. The rest of the Languedocian people had been overwhelmed with calamity, slaughter, and devastation. The estimates transmitted to us of the numbers of invaders and of the slain are such as almost surpass belief. We can neither verify nor correct them; but we certainly know that, during a long succession of years, Languedoc had been invaded by armies more numerous than had ever before been brought together in European warfare since the fall of the Roman empire. We know that these hosts were composed of men inflamed by bigotry and unrestrained by discipline; that they had neither military pay nor magazines; that they provided for all their wants by the sword, living at the expense of the country, and seizing at their pleasure both the harvests of the peasants and the merchandize of the citizens. More than three-fourths of the landed proprietors had been despoiled of their fiefs and castles. In hundreds of villages, every inhabitant had been massacred. ... Since the sack of Rome by the Vandals, the European world had never mourned over a national disaster so wide in its extent or so fearful in its character.--Sir J. Stephen, Lectures on the History of France.