Maison des Fleurs.'..sits at the heart of village life serving up southern France in all its glorious, sunlit simplicity. Antique bedsteads, window box geraniums and baguettes from round the corner are all  part of the scene here. So, too, is a magnificent array of beaches & ancient monuments....' Sunday Times

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The Corbieres have been inhabited since pre-history. The tiny village of Pepieux, for example, hosts one of the largest excavated dolmens in southern Europe. The Roman sites of this region are also very well known, and the medieval abbeys, churches and villages, many with their bastides still in evidence, are still there for all to see. What many visitors do not know, however, is that this part of France saw the first Crusades, not the Holy Land, and that it is believed that around half a million people died as a result of these Crusades. Originally known as the Albigensian Crusades, they later took the name of the Cathar religion.

 

The Cathars were the followers of a dissident church that flourished in several parts of Europe during the early Medieval period. Cathar means literally purity and was a sort of  Protestantism that promoted values of equality, neighbourliness and charity, and turned its back on the pomp, hierarchy and worldly wealth of the Catholic church of the time. Cathars believed that Earth was ruled by a malevolent God, and that Heaven was the world of the good God: this dualist concept of God was not unique to Catharism, but it was sufficient cause for the Catholic church of the time to brand Catharism as a heresy.

Catharism did not have a founder, nor a designated leader, and it did not only take root in one place. It appears to have originated in the Byzantine world, and to have spread to Europe via churches in Bulgaria. By the eleventh century, there were Cathar believers all over Europe, including England. But one of the places in which the Cathar church really flourished, and the place with which the word Cathar is now strongly associated, is the southern half of the French region of Occitanie  (Languedoc and Midi-Pyrénées).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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As in later centuries, religious dissent was not just a theological statement; it was a way by which local rulers and people could assert their differences and their cultural independence from the great European powers of the day, the Catholic church and the Kings of France.   Thus a large part of the Languedoc, people and nobles, adopted the Cathar heresy, and by so doing distanced themselves from the French and from Rome. By the early 13th century, Catharism had taken such a strong hold in the area, that in 1208 Pope Innocent III launched the notorious Albigensian Crusade - a crusade aimed not against the Infidels, but against the "heretical" Cathars. For twenty years, crusaders, led by the Barons of France including Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, sacked and pillaged the area, massacring Cathars or converting them by force to Catholicism. In the early 1220s, the Cathars' fortunes revived, prompting a second wave of Crusading this time led by King Louis VIII and later Louis IX. Finally, most of the area was subjugated, and in 1229, the Treaty of Meaux-Paris was signed, bringing almost the whole of Occitania into the realm of the French crown. Pockets of Cathar resistance held out for the next twenty-six years

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The castle at Montségur remained a Cathar stronghold until 1244, when it was finally taken and 200 Cathar prisoners taken were burned alive. The last Cathar stronghold, the Chateau de Peyrepertuse, fell in 1255. The last known Cathar parfait, Guilhem Belibaste was burnt alive in 1321 at Villerouge Termenes (this is situated just 20 km from Thezan des Corbieres).
 

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