Who Went on the Albigensian Crusade?

Extract

The Albigensian Crusade (1209–29) was a formative event in European history. At the medieval apogee of its power, the Roman Church called for the extirpation of heresy in southern France. The crusading energies that had galvanised the aristocracy of Latin Christendom for more than a century against Islam, the pagans of northeast Europe, and other external enemies, were now directed against the inhabitants of a region in the heart of Christendom. Twenty years of campaigning broke the power of the nobility of Occitania, allowing the Capetian monarchy to extend its sway to the Mediterranean and so paving the way for French supremacy in western Europe. This political revolution made possible the establishment of the Inquisition to root out heresy. These two decades of warfare in Languedoc and Provence therefore contributed to a much broader refiguration of religious authority and temporal power across the continent.

Despite extensive research into the history of the crusading expeditions to Languedoc between 1209 and 1229, as well as that of ensuing royal campaigns until 1244,¹ relatively little has been written about their participants. For instance, two major recent histories of the Albigensian Crusade devote scant attention to identifying crusaders or to considering the ties between them that may have assisted recruitment and contributed to the organisation of the crusades.² The only extensive research concerning the participants in the Albigensian Crusade has concentrated upon the small number who joined the campaigns for a lengthy duration, particularly the associates of Simon de Montfort (d. 1218) who dominated the enterprise until 1224, when Louis VIII of France effectively took over its leadership from Montfort’s son Amaury. Christine Keck-Woehl, Claire Dutton and Jean-Louis Biget, among others, have demonstrated how Montfort relied on a tight knot of crusaders from the Île-de-France, many of whom were already bound to him by ties of kinship, neighbourhood and association, as well as on individual adventurers from Burgundy, Champagne, Normandy and elsewhere. These studies have also traced the endeavours of the long-term participants in the crusade to establish themselves in the lands of dispossessed southern landowners and to govern a vast territory, demonstrating how new connections between the crusaders were forged in the turmoil of a long and bitter war.³