Did the Cathars exist, or did the Inquisition invent them?
Medieval churchmen described the Cathars as heretics who worshipped two gods and believed human souls were angels trapped in matter. Thousands died in the crusade and inquisition against them. Yet since the 2000s some historians have asked whether the sect was ever a real movement, or partly a moral panic.
Catharism, from a Greek word meaning the pure ones, was a Christian movement that flourished from the 12th to the 14th century across southern France and the north of Italy. According to Church writings, its followers held that a good God made the spiritual realm while an evil god, identified with Satan and the God of the Old Testament, ruled the physical world. Souls, in this view, were sexless angels caught in bodies and reborn repeatedly until saved by a ritual called the consolamentum. They honoured Jesus but denied he had a real physical body, and the writer Zoé Oldenbourg likened them to Western Buddhists.
Almost everything known about them comes from their enemies, because their writings were largely destroyed. Suspects questioned by inquisitors never called themselves Cathars; that label was coined by Catholic theologians, while surviving texts use Good Men, Good Women or Good Christians. A pamphlet of 1430 attacking the Gazarri even linked them to people riding brooms. Only a few writings survive, notably the Book of Two Principles.
That is why scholars such as Mark Pegg and Moore have questioned whether an organised sect existed. Critics like Claire Taylor answer that denying the group erases people who suffered for real beliefs, and that records plainly show dissenting practices across the French countryside; many accused chose the fire when offered the chance to recant. Most historians date identifiable Catharism to 1143 at Cologne, and a council at Saint-Félix-Lauragais in 1167 drew a Bogomil leader, Nicetas, pointing to influence from the Bogomils of the First Bulgarian Empire.
The Church branded them heretics and moved against them first with the Albigensian Crusade, then the Medieval Inquisition, which claimed they were wiped out by 1350. Thousands were killed. In reduced form the movement lingered in the Languedoc until around 1325 and in Italian cities until the 14th-century inquisitions ended it.
Source: Catharism
