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Albigensian crusades

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Komnenos View Drop Down
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  Quote Komnenos Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Topic: Albigensian crusades
    Posted: 17-May-2005 at 06:38
Originally posted by member987


The Cathars were just one of many gnostic sects brutally masacered and eliminated without mercy, by the Roman Catholic Church. Their only crime; regecting the views of the Roman Catholic Church. What happend to the Cathars, in the Albegensian crusade, was a dispicable thing. The war fought againts them was one of sickening measures taken througout time by the church, in an attempt to eliminate anyone they saw as a threat.


Before you blame the Catholic Church alone for the atrocities of the Albingensian Crusade, one should mention that the Church collaborated with a number of very worldly rulers, from the King of France to the minor English nobleman, whose intentions were far from spiritual and without whose help and brutality the Church would not have succeeded.
The Northern French Kingdom's interest were not so much to cleanse the country of heretics, but to gain control over a territory that was far richer and far more civilised than their own domain, something they eventually succeeded in doing.
As usual, as in all the other "crusades" and many other "religious" conflicts, in the Albingensian Crusades religion was too often nothing more than the convenient pretext for achieving territorial ambitions.
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  Quote Quetzalcoatl Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 25-May-2005 at 00:20

 

 

 I think it is all a little bit of an over-reaction to call all that a genocide. You forget one thing, the cathars weren't lamps, they had also their heroes and an army under Raymond of Toulouse. I think the crusades was just secondary here, Raymond was nearly succesful to create a nation (Occitania) that would have separated northern France from Southern France. Avignon was also attacked by the crusaders.



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  Quote Komnenos Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 25-May-2005 at 02:04
Originally posted by Quetzalcoatl



I think it is all a little bit of an over-reaction to call all that a genocide. You forget one thing, the cathars weren't lamps, they had also their heroes and anarmy under Raymond of Toulouse. I think the crusades was just secondary here, Raymond was nearly succesful to create a nation (Occitania) that would have separated northern France from Southern France.Avignon was also attacked by the crusaders.



Absolutely, although it showed some symptoms of later genocides, for long periods it was also just a war over supremacy over the French Midi and was fought with brutality on both sides.
And Raymond of Toulouse's side attracted a number of allies who weren't interested to defend the Cathar belief in the least, but rather in the extension of their terrority or influence, Peter of Aragon for example.
However, the Crusaders distinguished themselves on occasions with the same fanaticism and the same beastliness that were typical for similar enterprises conducted in the name of the Catholic faith.
BTW, I think, recently there has been an inflationary use of the word "genocide", which does unjustice to the real genocides like the Holocaust or the one in Rwanda. One should perhabs be a bit more careful and not use the word for every massacre or every pillage.

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  Quote Reginmund Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 25-May-2005 at 10:24
The Albigensian crusade should not be seen in a crusading context, but rather as a part of King Philippe II's grand scheme of uniting the various Frankish domains into one kingdom, France.

Philippe annexed the territories of Maine, Touraine, Anjou, Britanny and Normandy from the English King John, giving him his degrading nickname "Lackland". At the battle of Bouvines in 1214 he defeated the allied forces of King John, Emperor Otto IV and various nobles. Phillipe consolidated the French realm, which prospered under his rule, and he grew to be perhaps the most powerful monarch in Christendom at the time. Add to this picture a rebellious upstart by the name of Count Raymond de Toulouse, and then you'll see why things happened as they did.

Philippe's successor, Louis VIII, carried on his father's line of policy, seizing Poitou from the Angevins. He died before being able to conclude the Albigensian affair, and his son Louis IX took over where he left off. The time of individual Lords doing as they pleased was over, and in addition to this the counts of Toulouse were heretics, they had to be dealt with. At the treaty of Meux in 1229 Count Raymond V of Toulouse forfeited his lands.

Note: Louis IX can't really be credited for ending the Albigensian controversy, as he was fourteen years old at the time, the true ruler was his regent mother Blanche of Castile.

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  Quote Quetzalcoatl Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 25-May-2005 at 20:04

 

 Interesting arguments Komnenos and Regimund. Learn a lot from you guys. 



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  Quote Guests Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 25-Aug-2008 at 23:50
We are frequently told that morals are unchanging and absolute.  Why then would the concept of what we today call genocide change?
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  Quote Reginmund Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 26-Aug-2008 at 07:07
Morals are anything but unchanging and absolute. From the POV of the medieval Catholic church, these crusades served a greater purpose.
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  Quote Maharbbal Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 27-Aug-2008 at 11:15
These "crusades" have to be put into context.

In the Middle Ages it is very common to see a whole population vanish more or less quickly. Just think about the Greeks from Southern Italy, a century or so after the Normand conquest, what was left of them. Same goes for the Sicilain Muslims, into the late 1200s where were they. Many defeated people suffered a very similar fate.

Interestingly, a recent study on the DNA of the inhabitants of the Faroe Islands shows that the vikings had killed some 98% of the male population (or at least prevented it from reproducing themselves) but that the women had been left alive and carried the children of the Vikings.

A famous ethologist, once compared the chimp clans' struggles to actual human wars with females as bounty. But the correct wording is certainly that human wars are glorified chimps clans' wars. Destroying a population to colonize their land, or at least killing the males so as to make their women carry your children, is ingrained in our brains. Genocide (total or partial) is way too common in human history not to be natural.

So by invading the Southern territories and killing their population, the crusaders were merely having a normal behaviour. Beyond morality, it was natural.

In the same way, the colonization of the Americas allowed those who went there to multiply the number of their offsprings in a way unthinkable in Europe (in 17th cent France a poor peasant familly had hardly 2 surviving children on average, in Quebec at the same period the figure was closer from 8).
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