Reporting from Montpellier, FranceReporting from Montpellier, France — They lived simple lives of austerity and abstinence and suffered horrifying deaths, cut down by marauding armies and burned at ...

The Cathar heretics of Languedoc in France, and their terrible fate, have fascinated people for centuries. The Cathars were dissident, pacifist Christians who believed that an evil deity had created ...

In the 13th century, the Catholic Church launched a crusade not in the Holy Land, but in France. The Albigensian Crusade sought to wipe out the Cathars — and changed Europe forever. Fired FBI official ...

Paula Goodyer is drawn to the medieval past of southern France and the ghosts of the martyred Cathars. It was the ruined citadel at Montsegur that got us hooked on the story of the Cathars, a ...

The cultural legacy of an ancient religious sect that was almost wiped out in the Inquisition is everywhere to be seen in the… The cultural legacy of an ancient religious sect that was almost wiped ...

Catharism, a medieval offshoot of Gnostic Christianity, burned through the Catholic landscape of 13th-century Europe as swiftly as a plague. To the Catholic Church, it was very nearly as welcome. By ...

The Albigensian Crusade, the first of its kind against Europeans and Christians, was formally launched by Pope Innocent III in 1209, ushering in an era of abattoir Christianity in the Languedoc that ...

The Cathars were dissident, pacifist Christians who believed that an evil deity had created the material world and a good god all the invisible rest. As if to prove Cathar beliefs, the armed might of ...