The war against heresy in medieval Europe

R. I. Moore (2004)

Introduction

Jinty Nelson

Among British historians who have made their mark on the historiography of the European middle ages in the second half of the twentieth century, R. I. Moore (familiarly and affectionately known as Bob) is the one whose work has struck the strongest chord both with colleagues and with every successive student generation from the nineteen-seventies until the present. He is also probably the one most celebrated outside the U.K., notably in North America. Sessions in his honour were held not long ago at the International Medieval Congress at Kalamazoo, Michigan, and those papers are the core of a remarkable collection.¹ The editor, and most of the contributors, are Americans. In exploring Bob Moore’s impact on medieval history, some of them also showed how his work has engaged with important concerns, scholarly and more popular, of the post nineteen-sixties world: minorities, dissent and heresy, and persecution. That was an agenda tailor-made for American readers. Not that Bob Moore was ever a prophet without honour in his own country – on the contrary, his source-collection The Birth of Popular Heresy (1975), closely followed by The Origins of European Dissent (1977) and The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe, 950–1250 (1987), earned and have kept places on every university medieval history syllabus in the U.K. In 2000, timely as ever, Moore produced The First European Revolution c.970–1215, in a series, The Making of Europe, edited by Jacques Le Goff and published simultaneously in the five major European languages. Here Moore set the themes of the earlier books in a wider context and offered a multi-factored explanation of the eleventh and twelfth centuries’ dramatic and often violent upheavals. In earlier papers, he had written of ‘the appearance of the crowd on the stage of public events’ in the eleventh century, and of the ‘active and explicit involvement of the people’, stirred in various contexts, liturgical and political, by the great peace councils of the decades around the year 1000.² In 2000, he painted in the huge backcloth extending through the long twelfth century, economic and social changes interacting and combining to produce religious discontent, and demands for reform, surging from below, in the heartlands of Old Europe, evoking institutional response from a newly energized church. Meanwhile, in further papers, Moore identified the precise mechanisms of ecclesiastical centralization that were to become the props of inquisition and persecution.

In his 2004 Creighton Lecture, Moore returned to his longstanding preoccupation with the origins of ‘the war on heresy’, to re-pose two basic questions: when did that war begin, and why? His responses had previously centred on popular dissent and heresy, originating haltingly at first in the incipient, and localized, social and economic changes of the pre-Gregorian period, then growing rapidly in the generalized urbanization and commercialization of the twelfth century. For Moore to ask these questions anew in 2004 meant, as a rapt audience soon realized, an admission that his earlier answers, and those of other scholars in his wake, were no longer sufficient. The new answers focused, still, only more insistently, on the eleventh and twelfth centuries when were formed the preconditions for the persecuting society that emerged in the thirteenth. But Moore now took account of notable new work in the past decade or so, to emphasize less social and economic changes, than new ideas about the church articulated by a new type of churchman, not wandering preachers or heretic myth-weavers, but Catholic theologians trained in the rigorous rational routines of the schools of northern France. The war on heresy entailed the new construction of heresy itself as an ideological project. Moore’s own thinking took a new turn, inspired less by anthropology than by intellectual historians. His new reading of the first European reformation, interestingly developed simultaneously with (but as far as I can see independently of) Diarmaid MacCulloch’s synoptic take on the second, sixteenth-century Reformation, highlighted the role of ideas, more than social and economic change, in driving the two great cultural revolutions of pre-modern Europe. Moore now re-imagined what had too often been termed papal reform, or more vaguely, Reform, as the first major intervention of intellectuals in Western European history, in this respect picking up Le Goff’s understanding of the twelfth-century renaissance. In 2004, Moore focused firmly on the twelfth century, with Berengar of Tours a harbinger, and Bernard of Clairvaux and Peter the Venerable the key innovators, aided by a legally-trained papal emigré in France: Alexander III’s summoning of the Council of Tours, in 1163, was a critical turn of the screw.

New political forces were ready and able to harness the new trained minds. First the puny yet strategically placed monarchy and the princes of eleventh- and early twelfth-century France, then the mighty Angevin empire, promoted and exploited what might be termed l’embauche des clercs – the recruiting and setting to work of the intellectuals. The Gregorian papacy had summoned up ecclesiastical cadres, a new self-conscious elite, to drive Reform forward. Moore now clearly distinguished the different stages in an evolving project embodied in men of different twelfth-century generations: Bernard and Peter constructed heretics and deviants within, and enemies without, while the representative figure in the next generation was John aux Belles-Mains, the new churchman serving the modern prince, Henry II. (The contemporary nickname, with its hint of irony, nicely epitomizes a shift in what was required of clerical hands.)

All this was, and is, more than a revised version of Richard Southern’s account of the role of the clerici in twelfth-century European administrations, although the French focus resembles Southern’s. Moore re-envisioned the eleventh and twelfth centuries in much harder-headed mode as an age of new power. In his contribution to the essays acknowledging Moore’s impact, Edward Peters drew attention to the professionalization of the clerical cadre as key to their capacity to function in their new international role.³ Moore’s own injection of the political into the history of heresy is more than convincing per se, it allows newly convincing answers to be given to his when and why questions about the war on heresy. Only clerical stormtrooper-intellectuals, and not before the twelfth century, were equipped and motivated to construct the problem to which war was the only solution. Such clarity is clear gain.

There is also a loss. ‘The people’ may not have quit the stage, but their voices, individual and collective, are muted. They end up, now, in another part of the wood: a pre-medieval reformation world which Moore regards as actually predating Europe’s construction. In this latest phase of Moore’s dazzling intellectual trajectory, the high-medieval ‘popular’ has been replaced by the political, while, in a paradoxical effect of this tracing back of origins, Carolingian culture, as manifested in ‘pre-Gregorian Catholicism’, perforce becomes ‘popular’ in the sense that Peter Brown saw in the pre-twelfth-century ordeal as popular – implausible as that may seem to the average earlier medievalist. Bob Moore has always been one to challenge conventional categories, including periodizations. What we can be sure of is that his trajectory will continue, watched eagerly not just by medievalists but by historians across the discipline which the Creighton Lectures exist to celebrate, publicize and – now – diffuse to a wider public.

The war against heresy in medieval Europe*

R. I. Moore

By the end of the twelfth century the belief that heresy constituted not only a theoretical but a real and present danger to the faith had in itself become a test of Catholic orthodoxy. The growing fear of heresy was expressed in a battery of measures for its detection and suppression, but not assuaged by them. War was held to be permissible against heretics as against unbelievers. The Albigensian crusade, launched against the county of Toulouse in 1209, was only the first, although the most notorious, bloody and consequential, of the wars against heresy – in the literal sense rather than the metaphorical one of the title of this article – which marked the history of the thirteenth century, and whose essentially political character became ever more overt. In principle, responsibility for the prosecution of heresy belonged to the bishops in their dioceses, but they were increasingly urged to action by kings and popes, who in 1184 instructed them to make regular inquisition for heretics and their supporters on pain of themselves being identified as such. When that failed to yield the expected results, inquisition for heresy was increasingly taken out of the hands of the bishops, and entrusted to special agents directly armed by papal authority with sweeping powers to enter and interrogate whole communities, and to impose upon those whom they found to be recalcitrant heretics, their families and their supporters, a draconian array of penalties ranging from penance (such as the greatly feared obligation to wear distinguishing marks on the clothing), to imprisonment, confiscation and disinheritance, to death. The activities of the inquisitors extended throughout Latin Christendom, except for Scandinavia and the British Isles.¹ They were, however, most extensive, and most intensive, in an area of the Languedoc roughly centred on the territory between Toulouse, Albi, Béziers, Carcassonne and Foix,² and in many of the cities of Lombardy and Tuscany. From the beginning of the thirteenth century the war against heresy was waged in its many forms for the rest of the middle ages, perhaps reaching its peak in the reign of Pope John XXII, who died in 1322.

The ultimate penalty was exacted from a relatively small proportion of those convicted – for example in only 6.5 per cent (forty-one) of the 630 cases recorded by Bernard Gui, who as inquisitor of Toulouse between 1308 and 1323 kept a full and meticulous account of his activities.³ Conversely, it follows that the burnings represent only a small part of the lives devastated, of families destroyed, of communities traumatized, in the pursuit of heresy. Behind them all, although to degrees that varied with the circumstances of particular inquisitions and the temperaments of particular inquisitors, lay, as Colin Morris puts it, ‘the effective introduction, on an international scale, of procedures of enquiry which dispensed with the existing ideas of legality’,⁴ and in particular with the protections of permitting the accused to know the nature of the charges and evidence against him or her and the names of the witnesses, and to challenge them, and to call witnesses on his or her own behalf. The consequent opportunities for every kind of victimization and extortion wove dark threads of evasion, suspicion and duplicity into the fabric of European culture, and created a legacy, and a legend, with which we must still contend.⁵ One particular product of the energy and ingenuity of the inquisitors, however, goes to the heart of any attempt to understand them, or the circumstances that gave rise to them, and bedevils every attempt to write their history, or their pre-history. As the author of the most penetrating study of their methods to date, James Given, says, ‘The inquisitors were not mere slaves of reality. Their investigative techniques allowed them to create their own, tailor-made truth. Through their interrogation procedures the inquisitors could make concrete the ideas, fears and fantasies that resided only in their own minds. In a sense they could make these phantasms objectively real.’⁶

The inquisitors were not the first to achieve that feat, but they did it on an altogether new scale, with a consistency and power that dominated the historical record and historical memory so completely as to absorb within their own ‘tailor-made truth’ the fears and fantasies of earlier generations. In doing so they entrenched and validated them to an extent that bedevils every aspect of the question at issue here, simple enough on the face of it: ‘When and why did the war against heresy which was waged with such momentous consequences in thirteenth-century Europe begin?’ The answer of those who made the war was equally simple. The Third Lateran Council, which met in 1179, received the reports of a papal mission dispatched in the previous year to the city of Toulouse and the countryside around it.⁷ The heresy of the Cathars had been found well established in the city. The head of one of its wealthiest merchant families had been exposed as a devotee. At Albi it had been necessary for one of the leaders of the expedition, Abbot Henri de Marci of Clairvaux, to free the bishop of Albi from the prison of Roger of Béziers, notorious to posterity as a supporter of the heretics.⁸ The council ordained that the heretics and their supporters were to be excommunicated and their lands confiscated, and that those who took up arms against them were to receive the privileges of crusaders. Abbot Henri himself was elevated to the cardinalate, and two years later returned to the region with a large army, capturing the town of Lavaur and a number of leading heretics who confessed and renounced their errors. Henri did not believe them to be sincere, and his pessimism was confirmed by a mounting tide of reports over the following years that the heretics continued to enjoy widespread and public support against which the church was helpless.

Similar anxieties in Lombardy and Tuscany – entirely different from the Languedoc in almost everything except the absence of effective and centralized political authority – led pope and emperor, in rare unity, to issue at Verona in 1184 the decree Ad abolendam, which condemned a long list of heresies, and prescribed comprehensive and draconian penalties for them, their supporters and all who failed to act against them.⁹ Nevertheless, when Innocent III ascended the papal throne in 1198 he was fully persuaded that the influence of heresy was a primary obstacle to the re-establishment of the authority of his see, a view quickly reinforced by the murder of the governor whom he sent to restore Catholic authority in Orvieto. The decree Vergentis in senium, which Innocent addressed to the city of Viterbo in 1199, in effect equated heretics with traitors, liable to confiscation of all their property and thus to disinheritance.¹⁰ This provided a formidable incentive to respond to Innocent’s call in 1208 for a crusade against the count of Toulouse, as a protector of heretics, when the replacement of the archbishop of Narbonne, the preaching of Dominic Guzman and his companions and the dispatch of a series of papal legates to the Languedoc had achieved nothing except the murder of one of the legates, Peter of Castelnau. King Philip II of France held back, but could or would not prevent his vassals from seizing the opportunity. The sack of Béziers and of Carcassonne in 1209, conducted with notorious savagery, opened the series of wars which remains legendary – perhaps in both senses – for its cruelty and relentlessness, devastated the region, destroyed its aristocracy and with it a brilliant court civilization, and provided the field in which the first inquisitors went to work.

Until late in the twentieth century the open presence of heresy in the Languedoc and its command of aristocratic patronage were usually accepted as sufficient, if not always exclusive, explanation of these events. Most historians – Protestant and Catholic alike, although of course in very different tones – accepted at face value the descriptions of the heretics themselves, their beliefs and organization, which were provided first by Catholic chroniclers and later by the Dominican inquisitors, who compiled with immense thoroughness and often impressive care quantities of data that are still very far from having been fully examined, let alone assimilated, by modern scholars. The many reports of other heresies and heretics in the following decades, from almost every part of Europe – Waldensians, Spiritual Franciscans, Brethren of the Free Spirit and so many others – have similarly been accepted at face value until quite recently. Greater scepticism in the last three or four decades about the inquisitors’ assessment of the breadth of support for these heresies, and still more about the extent to which they constituted coherent and organized movements or conspiracies, raises new questions about the response of authority to them.¹¹ Nobody is likely to doubt either the reality or the profound importance of the political, legal, social and cultural changes that the war on heresy brought about, not only in the areas most directly affected, but in Europe as a whole. The question is, does heresy itself provide a sufficient explanation for it?

The most obvious reason for asking this question is that neither the fact nor the fear of heresy was in itself new in the thirteenth century. The use of heresy accusations to discredit opponents or undermine rivals had been a common resort since the conversion of Constantine, especially, perhaps, at times when established elites found positions as royal favourites and advisers under challenge from aggressive and talented newcomers.¹² One such case is often, if somewhat misleadingly, cited as inaugurating the history of popular heresy in medieval Europe. The fourteen or sixteen courtiers of King Robert I of France, clerics and laypeople, who at Orléans in 1022 became the first people in European history to be burned as heretics, were victims of the complicated and unrelenting vendettas that reverberated for generations after the coup d’état by which the Capetians seized the kingdom in 987.¹³ Some of those enmities continued to echo through the long series of condemnations of Berengar of Tours between 1050 and 1079, the most notorious and consequential heresy accusations against any individual in our entire period, still under-analysed, especially in their political dimensions.¹⁴ The career of Berengar is also, and perhaps more obviously, a reminder that learned heresy had always been a matter for concern, which varied in intensity, broadly speaking, with that of scholarly activity, but never quite died away. Learned heresy could assume a political dimension when great men chose to adopt scholars as their champions or standard bearers in public debate, a practice which has been very acutely and illuminatingly examined in respect of the Islamic world at this time,¹⁵ but insufficiently recognized in Western Europe, although it was plainly manifested not only in the trials of Berengar but probably in the better known ones of Peter Abelard.¹⁶ The political dimension was also in some measure a public, if not quite a popular one: when Abelard was summoned to Soissons in 1121 to defend his views on the Trinity, ‘I and the few pupils who accompanied me narrowly escaped being stoned by the people on the first day we arrived’.¹⁷

Political rivalry and personal enmity were probably always the commonest source of heresy accusations. Vast new opportunities were opened for both, in combination with burning idealism, altruism and personal sacrifice on a heroic scale, by the movement for the revitalization and reform of Catholic Christianity that drove and shaped the reconstruction – or, as some of us would maintain, construction – of European society and culture in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. From the end of the tenth century a strenuous insistence on identifying personal worth with the renunciation of worldly pleasures, possessions and power became increasingly influential. It stretched to breaking point the tension between the perceived ideals of the gospels and the apostles on the one hand, and the practical necessities of resourcing, organizing and manning the church in this world on the other, exposing the church and its ministers to the contempt and obloquy of its most ardent believers as well as its bitterest enemies, until it was often difficult, or impossible, to tell them apart. In the eleventh century this conflict assumed its most acute and fundamental form in the struggle against the simoniaca heresis. As Cardinal Humbert argued so devastatingly in his Books against the Simoniacs of 1058, the exchange of money or land for the power to perform the sacraments, which accompanied virtually every ordination and ecclesiastical appointment, revolted the sensibilities of the pious and undermined every claim to moral and spiritual authority (although not, it was necessary for Peter Damiani to insist in the following year, the validity of the sacraments themselves). It followed that the campaign against simony provided every bishop in every diocese with an urgent and compelling rationale for attacking and replacing the canons of his cathedral, scions of the local landed families whose command of their territory and regional balance of power rested, often crucially, on their control of the church’s endowments. The accompanying attack on clerical marriage not only reinforced this assault on the cathedral clergy, but thrust it still deeper, to the level of the parish, where in many regions hereditary priesthood was synonymous with long-established and well-respected communal leadership.

In short, not for the first time in European history, and very far from the last, the banner of reform flew above the eternal, unremitting struggle not only of purity against corruption, but of centralizing power against local hegemony. In one way or another it also provided the occasion of many accusations and counter-accusations of heresy. As early as 1016 we find the duke of Aquitaine supporting the bishop of Poitiers against his cathedral chapter by informing the canons that failure to support the bishop’s reforms – that is, to give up either their canonries or their wives and family incomes – would render them guilty of the Arian heresy.¹⁸ This had nothing to do with any speculation in which they may have indulged, in the intervals of fulfilling their matrimonial obligations, as to the priority of the persons of the Holy Trinity. Still less does it imply, as the discoverers of the duke’s charter suggested, that anyone had been agitating the populace over such questions. To invoke the name of the father of heresy, the greatest of all dividers of the church, was a standard formula for insisting on ecclesiastical obedience.¹⁹ It was precisely in support of this same demand for reform of the cathedral chapter that the Patarenes brought the people of Milan into open revolt against their archbishop and his clergy for most of the ten-fifties and ten-sixties, and that bishops were boycotted throughout Lombardy, and then all over Europe.²⁰ When Henry of Lausanne was permitted to preach at Le Mans in 1115, and Valdès in Lyons in the eleven-seventies, it seems probable that they were deliberately employed by the respective bishops, Hildebert of Lavardin and Guichard of Pontigny, to bring popular pressure to bear against recalcitrant cathedral clergy, although both men subsequently became notorious as heretics and enemies of episcopal authority.²¹

Henry continued for another thirty years after his expulsion from Le Mans to preach against clerical corruption and immorality throughout Aquitaine and especially in the region of Toulouse. He came radically to deny the spiritual as well as the fiscal claims of the bishops and priests of the church, and some of what were becoming its central doctrines, and apparently left numerous followers and a persistent memory in many villages of the region, where they ‘hated priests and enjoyed Henry’s jokes’.²² The followers of Valdès later embraced rather similar beliefs, and came to be execrated and pursued as the most dangerous enemies of the church apart from the ‘Cathars’, but only after their repeated attempts to be accepted as loyal, although not necessarily obedient, sons and daughters of the church had been spurned.²³ Both examples show that when the church and its ministers failed to embody the apostolic ideal of poverty and humility which the church itself had disseminated so effectively, the faithful might be persuaded to seek it elsewhere. Some did so discreetly, like the groups of unauthorized bible-readers who were reported to several bishops in Champagne and Flanders in the third and fourth decades of the eleventh century, and as those examined at Arras in 1024–5 put it, ‘had learned the precepts of the Gospels and the Apostles, and would follow no other scripture but this’.²⁴ Others attracted great notoriety, like the haggard and skin-clad preachers of half a century or so later who, whether they were heroes of the church like Robert of Arbrissel and Norbert of Xanten, or infamous heretics like Henry of Lausanne and Tanchelm of Antwerp, denounced the sins of the clergy with the same eloquence and attracted the same eager and adoring crowds to hear them do so. In either case, the primary source of their energy and their message was Catholic piety itself.

Almost all charges and assertions of heresy in the 200 years or so before the Dominican inquisition was established at Toulouse in 1233 arose in contexts like these – of disputes among the higher clergy, or ardent, but initially and essentially Catholic, evangelism. Until the eleven-forties at least there is no occasion on which we are compelled to suspect any other source or motivation, and few when any but the most excitable need be tempted to do so. Nevertheless, we should add that these early charges were usually accompanied by suggestions that the accused, or their leaders, were also resisting at least some of the innovations in the life of the church and its relations with the daily life of the believer that constituted both the pastoral objective of ecclesiastical reform, and its most substantial and far-reaching achievement – the baptism of infants, the sacralization of marriage, regular attendance at mass, confession to the priest and the subsequent penance, prayers and masses for the dead – as well as the construction of the cathedral and parish churches which for so many today remain the most characteristic achievements of medieval civilization. It was at this time that the network of parishes was completed in most parts of lowland Europe, that the sacraments of the church were defined and prescribed with new precision, that the framework and fabric to support them, comprehensively defined by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 and sustained by great landed endowments and an extensive array of revenues from many sources, was put in place – when the Catholic Europe of the ancien régime took shape, not perfectly or completely, of course, but for the first time universally and unmistakeably, with all that that implies.

Indeed, when we consider, from whatever perspective, the extent of the transformation in the daily lives of every family that these developments represented, the transfer of wealth that they demanded, and the social upheavals that were necessary to secure them, we may wonder whether what needs to be explained is the presence of popular dissent or its absence. It is sometimes forgotten that in most regions, and for most of our period, the most common and most popular alternative to Gregorian Catholicism was not heresy, either native or imported, and not (as is still occasionally imagined) pre-Christian survival, but pre-Gregorian Catholicism.²⁵ What exactly that meant is a question still far from satisfactorily answered, and any answer must obviously give great weight to local and regional variety, but it seems reasonable, if verging on tautology, to suppose at least that it usually included a much closer cultural identification between the priest and the community,²⁶ a more active collective involvement in ostensibly religious decision making (for example, in respect of such matters as sexual behaviour or sorcery accusations) than Gregorians would come to regard as proper, and less emphasis on the sacraments as defined and administered, as it were de haut en bas, by the clergy to the people. This is a point of particular relevance for the present argument in relation to the Languedoc, where for many reasons reform arrived much later than in the north – in many respects, indeed, hardly at all until the thirteenth century – with the result that a visitor like St. Bernard (in 1145) was shocked by what he found – ‘Churches without people, people without priests, priests without the deference due to them’²⁷ – and may have attributed to the positive influence of heresy a great deal that was simply a continuation of traditional practice much less different than he imagined from that of his own homelands in the not very distant past.

The presence of heresy among the people, whatever its source, does not seem to have worried the higher clergy very much until surprisingly late. The moment when it assumed a prominent place on the agenda of the universal church is very easily identified. In 1139 Abbot Peter of Cluny addressed to four Provençal bishops a treatise against Peter of Bruys, whose ‘stupid and sacrilegious heresy has killed many souls and infected more in and around your dioceses’, urging that ‘with your active help the grace of God will remove it little by little from your regions’.²⁸ According to Peter the Venerable – whose treatise and prefatory letter are the only evidence we possess – his namesake had been active in the region for twenty years, preaching particularly and successfully against infant baptism, the building of churches, the eucharist, the veneration of the cross, and prayers for the dead, before meeting his death in a bonfire of crosses made by his own followers at St. Gilles du Gard, on to which he was thrown by its indignant citizenry. About five years later Bernard of Clairvaux wrote to Count Alphonse-Jordan of Toulouse to announce that in company with a papal legate and the bishop of Chartres he was undertaking a preaching mission in the count’s lands, in order to combat ‘the great evils which the heretic Henry inflicts every day on the church’.²⁹ The burden of his complaint was that in consequence of Henry’s activity the services and sacraments of the church were being spurned and its priests scorned throughout the count’s territories. In 1145 Bernard completed the mission and scored some dramatic successes, including a long string of miracles, but concluded gloomily that he had failed to eradicate heresy from the region, which remained in need of ‘a great work of preaching’.³⁰

Peter the Venerable and Bernard of Clairvaux were the two most eminent and influential churchmen in Europe at this time. That both should have decided almost simultaneously – and as far as we know independently – to proclaim that popular preaching of heresy in the Languedoc was a menace to the faith, and to call for action against it, signalled a step change in the seriousness with which it would be treated thenceforward. No doubt their influence had something to do with the reissue by the Second Lateran Council, in 1139, of a decree of Pope Calixtus II at Toulouse in 1119 condemning as heretical ‘whosoever under the guise of piety condemns the eucharist, infant baptism, priesthood and religious ordination, as well as legitimate matrimony’.³¹ Nor can I think it altogether a coincidence that when in 1145 the clergy of Liège found some heretics in their city they reported the matter to the pope. No surviving record suggests that this had been done in any previous case – the same clergy of Liège had apparently not thought it necessary in similar circumstances ten years earlier – but it seems henceforth to have been normal.³²

Scholars, myself included, have not usually made much of this sudden urgency, no doubt because they have assumed that it represented the culmination of steadily mounting concern in response to the slowly widening trickle of complaints about popular heresy which so many of us have painstakingly traced from around the beginning of the eleventh century.³³ That presumption turns out to be surprisingly difficult to substantiate. It is not only that the trickle dissolves into droplets, if not into a miasma, as soon as we distinguish accusations arising from political and ecclesiastical rivalries or uninhibited spiritual enthusiasm from those which clearly reacted to the propagation of heterodox teachings in conscious defiance of authority. It is also that the chronic anxiety about the presence or dissemination of popular heresy that is sometimes supposed to have haunted the dreams of medieval Catholics is conspicuous in the tenth century, and even with certain well-defined exceptions in the eleventh, chiefly by its absence. The negative, of course, is incapable of proof, but the possibility of electronic searching brings us, practically speaking, a little closer than we were before. In the tenth century there was no contemporaneously recorded case of a heresy accusation. A doubtless unskilled search of Migne’s Patrologia Latina reveals only a handful of references to the great heretics of antiquity, none of them in a context which suggests any contemporary resonance, or any anxiety. This is by no means an exhaustive test, but it should be good enough to show up some smoke if there had been a fire of any size.³⁴

In and around the third decade of the eleventh century there was some serious persecution. There were burnings not only at Orléans in 1022, discussed above, but at Milan, where the members of a group discovered at the castle of Monforte di Alba, near Turin, were put to the stake in 1028.³⁵ In that year also the duke of Aquitaine summoned a council at Charroux ‘to extirpate’, according to Ademar of Chabannes, ‘the heresies which the Manichees had been spreading among the people’.³⁶ Ademar of Chabannes is one of the most voluminous and extraordinary writers of the early middle ages, whose works are only now becoming known and edited, with fascinating and important results. He certainly believed that heretics, whom he called Manichees, were active in the later part of his lifetime, referring to them repeatedly in his sermons as well as his chronicle.³⁷ He also believed that the patron saint of his abbey, Martial of Limoges, was one of the twelve apostles, and went mad when his attempt to prove it was publicly and humiliatingly rebutted.³⁸ His editors are inclined to think that he was right about the Manichees, but are willing to concede that he is short on specifics, to the point where we are still unable to point to any individual, with or without a name, anywhere in Europe, who could plausibly be described in that way before those of the eleven-forties to whom I will turn in a moment.³⁹

Nevertheless, Ademar, like Rodulfus Glaber, another highly idiosyncratic writer with an agenda of his own, was convinced, or at least anxious to convince his readers, that heresy was indeed resurgent in the eleventh century, for the first time since antiquity. Current opinion is sharply divided as to the extent and nature of what Ademar and Rodulfus knew and described, but whether or not we take them at their word (as for my own part I would not), their anxiety was not widely shared by their contemporaries or, for another 100 years, by their successors. Bishop Gerard of Cambrai dealt temperately, if loquaciously, with a group of lay gospel readers brought to his attention in 1024–5.⁴⁰ They avowed some serious errors, including the belief that the sacrament of baptism was annulled by the sins of the priest who administered it, but Gerard let them off with a sermon and a confession. Bishop Wazo of Liège, about twenty years later, famously counselled his brother of Châlons against imitating ‘the usual hasty fervour of the French’ by handing some suspected heretics in his diocese to the secular arm for punishment.⁴¹ Granted, this implies a fortiori a less relaxed view on the part of the bishop of Châlons to whom Wazo wrote, and perhaps on that of the French as well, but once again the Patrologia offers nothing to support it more generally. It shows the vocabulary of heresy in use in two eleventh-century contexts only: the long and widely reported series of disputes over the eucharist which raged around the life and trials of Berengar of Tours; and the great conflict between the reforming papacy and its numerous antagonists which dominated the second half of the century. On this evidence the only heresiarchs of the eleventh century were Berengar and the anti-pope Guido of Ravenna; the simoniaca heresis was added to the ariana heresis as an accusation that bishops could conveniently invoke to discipline their clergy; and the Manichaeans were an occasional historical memory. No words were wasted on heresy among the people.

The storm that had begun in the ten-fifties when the Patarenes of Milan attacked the archbishop and his clergy as monsters of incontinence and corruption, steeped in the heresy of simony, raged through Europe well into the twelfth century, and left few corners untouched. In one place after another monks and hermits appeared to denounce the bishop and his clergy, calling on the populace – as Ramihrdus did at Cambrai in 1076 – to boycott their services in accordance with papal directives; in one diocese after another, with motives of varying degrees of purity, bishops expelled, or tried to expel, married canons from their cathedrals and married priests from their parishes. Such conditions, not to mention wider changes like the rapid growth of the new monasticism and the cathedral schools in these decades, might seem likely to have fostered not only popular heresy itself, which to a very limited extent it did, but widespread anxiety about it, which so far as I can see it did not. Certainly there was concern that anticlerical agitation might be dangerous: as Marbod of Rennes complained of the hermit Robert of Arbrissel’s blistering attacks on the incontinence and avarice of the Breton clergy, ‘this is not to preach but to undermine’.⁴² But such occasional misgivings were expressed in the context of a wider confidence that Christianity had finally triumphed over its enemies.

Jay Rubinstein has recently painted a most interesting picture of the young Guibert of Nogent growing up in Picardy in the ten-eighties and ten-nineties, and forming ‘a remarkably naive view of eleventh-century Europe – one that sees Christianization as complete, and senses no danger from heretics and no rivalry with Judaism’⁴³ – a view precisely echoed by Bishop Herbert Losinga of Norwich (d. 1119) when he wrote that ‘the Catholic faith has fought, and has crushed, conquered and annihilated the blasphemies of the heretics, so that either there are no more heretics or they do not dare to show themselves’.⁴⁴ Guibert’s confidence would be shaken only when he became an abbot, and was thrown into contact with the lively and unruly scholarly and urban communities of Laon and Soissons. Even then, although he did interrogate some suspected heretics whom he identified (wrongly) as ‘Manichees’, in 1114,⁴⁵ it was his encounters with Jews, not with Christian heretics, that convinced him that the faith was under siege.⁴⁶ His younger contemporary Ordericus Vitalis, author of the widest-ranging and most voluminous chronicle of the age, showed a not unfriendly interest in the hermit-preachers, despite their attacks on the hierarchy and the traditional style of monasticism practised in his own house at St. Evroul, but none whatsoever in popular heresy or the threat of it. He does not mention, although it is hard to imagine that he did not hear about it, the episode in 1116 of which historians have made so much (mea culpa), when Henry of Lausanne fomented a popular insurrection against the clergy of Le Mans, and presided for some weeks over what amounted to a commune there. By the eleven-twenties, if we are to believe Peter the Venerable, Peter of Bruys had launched a spectacular and violent career of anticlerical agitation in Provence – which, apart from a contemptuous passing reference from Abelard,⁴⁷ went apparently more or less unnoticed outside the region until Peter the Venerable himself produced his treatise two decades later.

It appears, therefore, that the démarche of Peter the Venerable and St. Bernard was both sudden and disproportionate equally to the real and to the perceived threat represented by dissident activity. Yet, by a curious irony, these years in which they were raising it for the first time to the level of a real and present danger to the church as a whole, and not merely an occasional local nuisance, saw the first clear description of what their successors were to identify, rightly or wrongly, as the most dangerous of all the heresies to threaten the medieval church. It is in a letter to Bernard himself, from Eberwin, provost of the Premonstratensian canonry of Steinfeld, near Cologne.⁴⁸ Eberwin describes the interrogation in Cologne in 1143 not of one group of heretics but of two, who had brought themselves to the attention of the authorities by quarrelling publicly with each other. Two spokesmen of one group, namely ‘one who was called their bishop with his companion’, claimed that ‘their heresy had been hidden until now ever since the time of the martyrs, and persisted in Greece and other lands’. They described in some detail beliefs and practices very like those of the Bogomils in Bulgaria as described by Cosmas the Priest (soon after 972) and later Byzantine writers, and their sect was divided between simple believers (auditores) and initiates (electi) by whom alone its rituals could be carried out and the sect perpetuated. The bishop and his companion went to the stake, ‘and endured the torment of the flames not merely courageously but joyfully’. The diffusion of this sect in the Rhineland and the development of its teachings during the next twenty years may be traced in the sermons of Eckbert of Schönau (1163–7).⁴⁹ Many connect it, quite plausibly, with the purge, trial and burning of Bogomils in Constantinople in 1143,⁵⁰ in consequence of which, it is suggested, fugitives, or migrants, continued to make their way up the Danube and the Rhine, occasionally attracting converts, and occasionally persecution. Until recently nobody has questioned either the authenticity or the accuracy of Eberwin’s account, although it now seems that we must at least be prepared not to take it simply at face value.⁵¹

Most specialists heretofore have agreed, however, that what Eberwin and Eckbert were describing was the appearance and early development of what came to be conventionally described as the Cathar heresy. Indeed, Eckbert was the first to use the word to describe medieval heretics, although it never caught on in the middle ages as it has with modern historians.⁵² We might be tempted to entertain the possibility that it was not by coincidence that Peter the Venerable and Bernard of Clairvaux were denouncing the dangers of heretical preaching with a new stridency at just the same time. Is it not conceivable that they expressed alarm at the appearance of a new and dangerous heresy because they knew that a new and dangerous heresy was in fact appearing? The evidence is against it. It is not simply that neither Peter nor Bernard mentions any of the obvious differences that we would expect to find between Western anti-clericals and Eastern dualists, and which Eberwin listed clearly in a letter to Bernard himself. In the sermon that Bernard composed in response he attached little importance to the distinction that Eberwin had made between the two groups of heretics, did not address the issue of theological dualism or associate the errors of either group with it, and did not appear to link the heresy that Eberwin said had ‘lain hidden in eastern lands since antiquity’ with either Mani or any other heresiarch, actually complaining that these people seemed to have no prophet after whom their sect could be named.⁵³ Nor did the fact that he had been alerted in this way by Eberwin only a year or so previously cause Bernard to suggest that either a foreign or a dualist heresy was among the dangers to the faith with which he believed the Languedoc to be so abundantly infected in 1145, either when he wrote to the count of Toulouse before he embarked on his mission or through the account which his secretary Geoffrey of Auxerre composed of it afterwards.⁵⁴

The testimony of Eberwin and Eckbert is accompanied by a number of further incidents in the Rhineland, Flanders and northern France in the eleven-fifties and eleven-sixties.⁵⁵ The differences between them, even in very fragmentary reports, invalidate the common assumption that they can all be assimilated to the same sect or movement. For example, the common habit of describing the ‘Publicani’ who were found in England c.1165 as ‘Cathars’ is flatly contradicted by William of Newburgh’s account of their beliefs, the only one that we have, according to which they ‘attacked holy baptism, communion and matrimony’, as we should expect of anyone accused of heresy by this time, but accepted the incarnation of Christ, as theological dualists could not have done.⁵⁶ The admission of heretical beliefs about the sacraments excludes the possibility that the accused were dissembling, to which twentieth-century scholars, like twelfth-century bishops, were apt to resort when the evidence failed to confirm their expectations: what would have been the point of denying one charge while conceding the others?

Nevertheless, there is enough at this time to suggest that something new was afoot. What we may think it was is a question inseparably linked with another and fundamental change in the way in which those accused of heresy were treated. Up to 1140 or so action against heresy had been confined, by and large, to those who forced themselves on the attention of the clergy by preaching it, and its discovery resulted in death, by burning or otherwise, only in rather exceptional circumstances, for example when the political stakes were high, as at Orléans or Monforte in the ten-twenties, or when churchmen were trying to override the outcome of trial by ordeal.⁵⁷ In 1157, however, a council at Reims demanded that not only the heretics (described as Manichees) whom it complained of, ‘hiding among the poor and under the veil of religion labouring to undermine the faith of the simple’, but their followers should be punished by imprisonment, branding and exile;⁵⁸ in 1163 a group, including a young girl whose steadfastness moved the onlookers to pity, were burned at Cologne, having been found when their neighbours noticed that they did not go to church on Sundays;⁵⁹ and in 1165 King Henry II caused ‘rather more than thirty people, both men and women’ to be stripped and driven from the city of Oxford ‘with ringing blows into the intolerable cold, for it was winter . . . and they died in misery’. Apart from their leader, these were ‘simple and illiterate people, quite uncultivated peasants, Germans by race and language’, whose evangelism had secured the conversion of one old woman.⁶⁰ This amounted to the first mass execution for heresy in the middle ages, and for good measure Henry followed it up a few weeks later with the first secular legislation against it, in the twenty-first chapter of the Assize of Clarendon, which proclaimed harsh penalties for anyone who gave aid or succour to these people – even though he must have known perfectly well that they were already dead. In short, we see in the years around and after 1160 a clear shift in the direction of punishing not only the preachers of heresy but their followers, and of punishing them severely.

However the scattered and fragmentary appearances, or accusations, of heresy in the eleven-fifties and early eleven-sixties are to be interpreted, none of them concerned the county of Toulouse. We have no suggestion from that region of anything since Bernard’s 1145 mission to excite the alarm of the prelates assembled at Tours in 1163, under the presidency of Pope Alexander III. Yet, if there was a moment at which the war against heresy might be said to have been formally declared it was when they called for the extirpation of the heresy now ‘spreading like a cancer from Toulouse through Gascony and neighbouring regions’.⁶¹ The council’s demand that the devotees of this heresy should be searched out for public exposure, social and commercial boycott and other punishment anticipated not only the procedures of the inquisitors but their premise that heretics were there to be found, and that failure to show themselves only confirmed their perfidy. Tours was the favourite city of Henry II, upon whose support the pope, exiled from Italy by his conflict with Frederick Barbarossa, was heavily dependent at this time. Henry took an active interest in the preparation of the council, encouraging the bishops of all his lordships to attend it, in marked contrast to his English predecessors, who had preferred to keep their bishops at home on such occasions.⁶² We may regard this as heartening testimony of the king’s pious concern for the spiritual welfare of his subjects, unless some other possibility suggests itself.

Whatever may have been the situation before the Council of Tours, reports quickly follow it that heretics were numerous, brazen and well entrenched in the county of Toulouse. We are told, for instance, that in 1165, at a meeting summoned at Lombers with the apparent object of reassuring outside opinion that the directive of Tours was being implemented, they defied the assembled secular and ecclesiastical notables of the region, denounced the church as corrupt and refused to confirm by oath their own assertions of Catholic orthodoxy.⁶³ The seriousness of the situation eventually led to the dispatch of a papal legation, in 1178, under heavy pressure from Louis VII and Henry II, who provided most of its members. According to one of its leaders the mission ‘found [Toulouse] so diseased that from head to feet there was not a healthy place in it’.⁶⁴ We have already noted that the reports of the legates to the Third Lateran Council in the following year presented an account of Catholicism helpless before an aggressive and powerfully supported dualist sect whose leaders were wealthy and influential public figures, which in turn laid the foundation for the ecclesiastical, diplomatic and eventually military offensives that followed over the next thirty years, and has been accepted effectively without question by almost all subsequent historians.

The difficulty about all this, however, is that in recent years it has become clear that virtually all of the evidence for heresy in twelfth-century Languedoc is tainted, although it is not yet clear quite how irredeemably, not only in having been written some time after the events in question, and therefore at best with hindsight, but by the political and ecclesiastical ambitions of its sponsors. Most of what comes from the Cistercian order is associated with the abbeys of Fontfroide, near Narbonne, which served as a base for the campaigns against heresy in the later part of the century, and for preparations for the crusade, including among others the activities of Henry de Marcy, Peter of Castelnau and the first leader of the crusade, Arnold-Amaury of Cîteaux, and of Hautecombe, near Chambéry, of which Henri de Marcy and Geoffrey of Auxerre were successively abbots.⁶⁵ For the crucial period from the Council of Tours to the mission of 1178, all the evidence comes, directly or indirectly, from Angevin chronicles, and especially from Roger of Howden. When this remarkable but seldom remarked fact first struck me, more than thirty years ago, I was content to attribute it, as apparently everyone else had done, to the inherent superiority of English historiography, but since John Gillingham has shown us just how close Roger was to the royal household it assumes an altogether new significance.⁶⁶ In short, as I have argued in more detail elsewhere,⁶⁷ both the canon of 1163 – or at the least its reference to Toulouse – and the tone of the subsequent historiography – how far the substance we will never know for sure – were inspired by the political requirements of Henry’s forty-year war against Toulouse (as William of Newburgh called it), launched after the failure of his expedition of 1159. This was the greatest military commitment of the reign, which had been frustrated when Louis VII interposed himself between Henry and the city, so that Henry could pursue his prey only at the price of attacking his lord. That would have ceased to be a problem if either Louis or Raymond could plausibly be accused of protecting heretics. It may, of course, have been merely coincidental that a torrent of information about the extent and activity of heresy in the county began to emanate from the Angevin court immediately afterwards. What is certainly the case is that if we depended for information on sources like the Chronicle of Morigny, Hugh of Poitiers or Geoffrey de Vigeois, so much nearer the spot, we should have no evidence whatsoever that there was anything unusual amiss, religiously speaking, in the count’s dominions at this time.⁶⁸

The fabrication which can be observed in the second half of the twelfth century of a unified and doctrinally coherent anti-church out of a multitude of various and for the most part insignificant deviations from Catholic teaching and practice, real and alleged, contributed immensely if not indispensably to the preparation and conduct of the war against heresy in the thirteenth century. Still, we must not fall, historiographically, into the corresponding error of attributing it exclusively to the designs of Henry II on the count and county of Toulouse and the spiritual anxieties and ambitions of the Cistercians. Religious differences evoked similar responses and were put to similar uses in other parts of Europe, although on nothing like so ambitious a scale, either politically or intellectually. To look back from the eleven-eighties is to see how the identification of popular heresy as a serious and a general danger to the church and the faithful in the generation of Peter the Venerable and Bernard of Clairvaux had opened the way to the elaboration of a set of ideas and the construction of institutions which fuelled the war against heresy in the years to come. It also underpinned the formation of what I have previously called the persecuting society, not only because its victims included in addition to heretics, Jews, lepers, homosexual men, prostitute women and many others, but because in order to persecute these groups it was necessary first, in varying degrees, to create them, by welding scattered fragments of reality into coherent abstractions – ‘the Jew’, ‘the heretic’, ‘the Albigensian’ and so on – and then to classify the resultant stereotype as a menace to Christian society which must be ruthlessly extirpated. I have always insisted, and do so again, that this was neither a wholly cynical nor a deliberate or consciously co-ordinated process.⁶⁹ We persuade others most effectively when we have first persuaded ourselves, and transparent sincerity, however misguided, is a powerful asset in any cause.

We have identified the years around 1140 as the moment when the identification and classification of heresy (but not yet of the Cathar heresy) as a general and present danger took place. It is an interesting moment at which to search for an explanation, a moment when the new scholastic culture whose adepts would form the clerical elite – and the power elite – of the new Europe was crystallizing. It was at about this time, for example, that the arts curriculum was settling into shape in Paris and the first Gratian was completing his concordance of canon law in Bologna. It was in 1141 that Peter Abelard was accused of heresy at Sens, in a confrontation whose roots stretched back for two decades and more through the bitter political and clerical factions of northern France, and Constant Mews has argued that one of the most powerful anxieties that Abelard had aroused was precisely that his strictures on the abuse of spiritual power might undermine the authority of the French bishops just when they were peculiarly nervous of popular unrest in their cities, and the papacy was under similar pressure in Rome.⁷⁰

At a personal level Bernard’s role as the prosecutor of Abelard at Sens is perhaps a reminder that we need seek no very elaborate explanation of his response to the letter of Eberwin of Steinfeld and the preaching of Henry of Lausanne. It was his habit to see the church beset by dangers on every side, and he devoted his life to combating them. The case of Peter the Venerable is more revealing. In these years Peter put together his treatises not only against heresy but against the Saracens and the Jews. In a masterly study Dominique Iogna-Prat has shown how in those works Peter drew upon the immense authority and resources of his congregation – Cluny was the superior of something in excess of 1,000 monastic houses all over Europe, and still, although no longer considered to be at the spiritual cutting edge, the cynosure of many more, with measureless prestige and connection among the aristocracy, the higher the better – to define and defend Latin Christendom against its foes, by identifying and exposing its most dangerous enemies. That work was necessary because two centuries of upheaval and reconstruction had, to borrow Max Weber’s terms, shattered a community (or communities) of blood and replaced it with a community of faith. That does not mean that family ceased to matter, or that faith had not mattered before. It does mean that the men who henceforth assumed more and more commandingly the dynamic and creative roles in the making of Europe, in its secular and ecclesiastical courts, its universities and its cities, were united and driven by ties of culture which for them overrode the values and loyalties of kinship. That culture was encapsulated in a renewed and rearticulated faith, which now made much greater personal and spiritual demands on its clerisy, in proportion to the power, status and authority it conferred on them. It needed its enemies, to unite and discipline its followers, and to show the world the urgency of heeding their commands.

This community of faith, however, was a northern construct. It had been hammered together, over the previous century and a half, in the territories of the old Carolingian heartlands between the Loire and the Rhine, with outposts in its English and Sicilian colonies, Lombardy, Tuscany and Catalonia, to provide a stable basis for the management of an advanced agrarian economy, and the more elaborate political and cultural structures that it could support. The costs in both collective and individual disruption had been enormous, including the enserfment of free peasantries; the replacement of the loosely structured kin-group by the dynastic lineage, with the accompanying restriction of inheritance, in many regions, to a single descendant, usually the eldest legitimate son; the creation of a rigid demarcation, in both people and land, between church and laity; and the promulgation and absorption of a code of values, including a formulation of the Christian faith, based on the permanent or at least indefinite renunciation of personal independence and legitimate sexual gratification. Those who secured the benefits and suffered the pains of that transformation quickly came to see their neighbours who had not, in Ireland, or in Wales, or in the Languedoc, as less than human, enemies of God and threatening to man, and treated them accordingly.⁷¹

The generation of Bernard of Clairvaux and Peter the Venerable, both born around 1090, was perhaps the first to be clearly recognizable as the product of these changes. It was also the generation that put in place the foundations of the new world, which by 1140 were beginning to show, as it were, above ground. Their successors, students when they were at the height of their powers, held responsible positions in the households of great men by the eleven-fifties, and were great men themselves by the eleven-seventies: John ‘aux Belles Mains’ of Canterbury, for example, served his apprenticeship in the household of Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury, and became bishop of Poitiers in 1162, in which capacity he attended the Council of Tours and was a member of the mission to Toulouse in 1178; he became archbishop of Lyons, on the death of Guichard of Pontigny, in 1181, and withdrew his predecessor’s protection of Valdès, whose followers rapidly descended, or were driven, into bitter and durable enmity to the church.⁷²

It does not seem unduly fanciful to account in that way for a certain chronological regularity which may not have been immediately obvious in this narrative. The menace of heresy among the people, identified in general terms in the early eleven-forties, had become the object of hot pursuit in the sixties; by the eleven-eighties a battery of propaganda and procedures was in place to justify and sustain the campaigns that were waged on all fronts in the thirteenth century. It would be rash to insist that those intervals of twenty years or so are anything more than suggestive. On the other hand, if the war against heresy was conceived at a moment when the scholastic culture which defined, articulated and sustained the new social order that we call medieval Europe was becoming more self-conscious, and bracing itself to secure its command both of cultural and of social power, its subsequent development might suggest that it served not only to articulate the values of a new ruling culture, but to consolidate the influence of a new governing class.

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¹ Heresy and the Persecuting Society in the Middle Ages: Essays on the Work of R. I. Moore, ed. M. Frassetto (Leiden, 2006).

² R. I. Moore, ‘Family, community and cult on the eve of the Gregorian reform’, Trans. Royal Hist. Soc., 5th ser., xxx (1980), 49–70, at p. 49; R. I. Moore, ‘Postscript: the peace of God and the social revolution’, in T. Head and R. Landes, The Peace of God: Social Violence and Religious Response in France around the Year 1000 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1992), pp. 308–26, at p. 320.

³ E. Peters, ‘Moore’s 11th and 12th centuries: travels in the agro-literate polity’, in Frassetto, pp. 11–29, recalling the insights of H. G. Koenigsberger, an early modernist who wrote one of the best books on medieval Europe.

* This article is a version of the Creighton Lecture delivered in the University of London on 1 Nov. 2004, based on the Henry Charles Lea Memorial Lecture delivered at the University of Pennsylvania in April 2003. I would like to thank those who arranged and attended both lectures, as well as Mark Pegg and Elizabeth Redgate, for stimulating my thoughts and endeavouring to correct my errors. The text is that of the lecture as delivered, and has been unable to take account of important work published since it went to press, to some of which references are given in the notes.

This article was first published in Historical Research, lxxxi (2008), 189–210.The editors would like to thank Professor Moore for his kind permission to reproduce it here.

¹ H. C. Lea, A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages (3 vols., New York, 1887; frequently reprinted) remains by far the best general account, although greatly exaggerating the extent to which ‘the inquisition’ should be envisaged as a single, centralized institution (cf. R. Kieckhefer, ‘The office of inquisition and medieval heresy: the transition from personal to institutional jurisdiction’, Jour. Eccles. Hist., xlvi (1995), 36–61).

² There is, notoriously, no satisfactory name, then or now, for the region to which I refer for convenience as the Languedoc (cf. F. L. Cheyette, Ermengard of Narbonne and the World of the Troubadours (Ithaca, N.Y., 2001), pp. 3–4, 41–3).

³ J. Given, Inquisition and Medieval Society: Power, Discipline and Resistance in Languedoc (Ithaca, N.Y., 1997), p. 69.

⁴ C. Morris, The Papal Monarchy: the Western Church from 1050 to 1250 (Oxford, 1989), p. 474.

⁵ For a searching account of the permeation of mentalities by stereotypes derived from heresy hunting, see K. Sullivan, Truth and the Heretic: Crises of Knowledge in Medieval French Literature (Chicago, Ill., 2005); for the legacy and the legend, see E. Peters, Inquisition (New York, 1988).

⁶ Given, pp. 231–4. For the new levels of sophistication which this central preoccupation of inquisitorial studies has attained in recent years, see also M. Pegg, The Corruption of Angels: the Great Inquisition of 1245–6 (Princeton, N.J., 2001), esp. chs. 4–11; J. H. Arnold, Inquisition and Power: Catharism and the Confessing Subject in Medieval Languedoc (Philadelphia, Pa., 2001); Texts and the Repression of Medieval Heresy, ed. C. Bruschi and P. Biller (Woodbridge, 2004).

⁷ See the letters of Pietro of S. Chrysogono and Henri de Marci in Gesta Regis Henrici Secundi, ed. W. Stubbs (2 vols., 1867), i. 202–6, 214–20 (trans. R. I. Moore, The Birth of Popular Heresy (1975), pp. 113–22). For a full account and analysis of the mission and its aftermath, see Cheyette, pp. 286–322.

⁸ Cheyette, pp. 315–22, comments that the dispute was probably over lordly rights, and that Henri was always on the lookout for heretics.

⁹ J. D. Mansi, Sacrorum conciliorum nova et amplissima collectio, xxii, col. 492.

¹⁰ Patrologia Latina, ed. J. P. Migne (221 vols., Paris, 1844–1904), ccxiv, col. 537.

¹¹ Cf. R. E. Lerner, The Heresy of the Free Spirit in the Later Middle Ages (Berkeley and Los Angeles, Calif., 1972), esp. at pp. 1–32.

¹² Cf. P. Brown, ‘Sorcery, demons and the rise of Christianity: from late antiquity into the middle ages’, in his Religion and Society in the Age of St. Augustine (1972), pp. 119–46; E. Peters, The Magician, the Witch and the Law (Philadelphia, Pa., 1978), pp. 15–18.

¹³ The most familiar, although not the earliest, account of this much-discussed episode is that of Paul of St. Père de Chartres, Gesta Synodi Aurelianensis (Recueil des historiens des Gaules et de la France, ed. M. Bouquet and others (24 vols., Paris, 1738–1904), x. 536–9). Its political context was established by R. H. Bautier, ‘L’hérésie d’Orléans et le mouvement intellectuel au début du xie siècle’, in Enseignement et vie intellectuelle, IXe–XVIe siècles: actes du 95e Congrés National des Sociétés Savantes (Reims, 1970), Section de philologie et d’histoire jusqu’à 1610 (2 vols., Paris, 1975), i. 63–88; and B. Stock, The Implications of Literacy (Princeton, N.J., 1983), pp. 106–20, showed how ‘through textual reconstruction [the accused] were made part of a widespread, historically evolving conspiracy against the church, of which they had no knowledge, and to which they were little if at all related’ (p. 120).

¹⁴ For a recent summary, see C. M. Radding and F. Newton, Theology, Rhetoric and Politics in the Eucharistic Controversy, 1078–9: Alberic of Monte Cassino against Berengar of Tours (New York, 2003), pp. 1–31.

¹⁵ M. Chamberlain, Knowledge and Social Practice in Medieval Damascus, 1190–1350 (Cambridge, 1994).

¹⁶ R. H. Bautier, ‘Paris au temps d’Abélard’, in Abélard en son temps, ed. J. Jolivet (Paris, 1981), pp. 21–77, at p. 60. I have developed this point further in ‘Heresy as politics and the politics of heresy, 1022–1180’, in Law and the Illicit in Medieval Europe, ed. R. M. Karras, J. Kaye and E. A. Matter (Philadelphia, Pa., 2008).

¹⁷ Historia calamitatum, trans. in B. Radice, The Letters of Abelard and Heloise (rev. edn., 2003), p. 20; cf. M. Clanchy, Abelard: a Medieval Life (Oxford, 1997), pp. 289–92.

¹⁸ P. Bonnassie and R. Landes, ‘Une nouvelle hérésie est née dans le monde’, in Les sociétés méridionales autour de l’an mil, ed. M. Zimmerman (Paris, 1992), pp. 435–59.

¹⁹ Y. M. J. Congar, ‘Arriana haeresis’, Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques, xliii (1959), 449–61. The point is nicely illustrated by Wazo of Liège, who on receiving from Bishop Roger of Châlons-sur-Marne a description of heretics whom Roger regarded as Manichees, because they ‘shun the eating of meat and believe it profane to kill animals’, replied: ‘The Christian religion abhors this view and finds these heretics guilty of the Arian heresy’ (Anselm of Liège, Gesta episcoporum Leodicensis, ed. R. Koepke (Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores, vii), p. 227; Moore, Heresy, p. 22). Wazo, one of the most learned men of his day, was perfectly aware of the theological difference between an Arian and a Manichee, but it was discipline, not theology, that he saw at issue here.

²⁰ H. E. J. Cowdrey, ‘The papacy, the Patarenes and the church of Milan’, Trans. Royal Hist. Soc., 5th ser., xviii (1968), 25–48; I. R. Robinson, ‘The friendship network of Gregory VII’, History, lxiii (1978), 1–22.

²¹ R. I. Moore, ‘Heresy, repression and social change in the age of Gregorian reform’, in Christendom and its Discontents, ed. S. D. Waugh and P. D. Diehl (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 19–46, at pp. 38–41; M. Rubellin, ‘Au temps où Valdès n’était pas hérétique: hypothèse sur la rôle de Valdès à Lyon’, in Inventer l’hérésie? Discours polémiques et pouvoirs avant l’inquisition, ed. M. Zerner (Nice, 1998), pp. 193–218; M. Rubellin, ‘Guichard de Pontigny et Valdès à Lyon: la rencontre de deux idéaux réformateurs’, Revue d’histoire des religions, ccxvii (2000), 39–58.

²² Geoffrey of Auxerre, Vita Prima s. Bernardi (P.L., clxxxv), cols. 410–16, at col. 412; R. I. Moore, The Origins of European Dissent (2nd edn., Oxford, 1987), pp. 83–114. My account of Henry’s teachings, however, will be significantly modified (although not necessarily moderated) by Monique Zerner’s forthcoming edition of his debate with the monk William (see, meanwhile, her ‘Au temps de l’appel aux armes contre les hérétiques: du contra Henricum du moine Guillaume aux contra hereticos’, in Zerner, Inventer, pp. 119–56).

²³ Rubellin; E. Cameron, Waldenses: Rejections of Holy Church in Medieval Europe (Oxford, 2000), pp. 11–35.

²⁴ Acta Synodi Atrebatensis (P.L., cxlii), col. 1272; Moore, Heres y, pp. 16–17.

²⁵ I use the term Catholicism because acknowledgment of the centrality and primacy of Rome was universal and uncontested (as far as we can tell), although it was understood and exercised very differently from what became the case after the late 11th century (cf. L. K. Little, ‘Romanesque Christianity in Germanic Europe’, Jour. Interdisciplinary Hist., xxiii (1993), 453–74).

²⁶ Cheyette’s discussion, with calculations, of the relative wealth of parish clergy (pp. 302–7) offers a useful caution on this point, but it is based on much later data: the crucial question here is when and how the distance his figures suggest for the 13th century between even the poorest parish clergy and the peasantry had originated.

²⁷ Bernard, Epistola 241 (P.L., clxxxii), col. 434.

²⁸ Peter the Venerable, Tractatus contra Petrobrusianos, ed. J. Fearns (Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis, x, Turnhout, 1968), 3–6; Moore, Heresy, p. 60. For a comprehensive and searching analysis, see D. Iogna-Prat, Ordonner et exclure (Paris, 1998), pp. 99–264 (translated as D. Iogna-Prat, Order and Exclusion (Ithaca and London, 2002)).

²⁹ See above, n. 27.

³⁰ Geoffrey of Auxerre, Vita Prima s. Bernardi (P.L., clxxxv), cols. 410–16, at col. 412. On Bernard, Peter and the highlighting of heresy at this point, cf. J.-L. Biget, ‘“Les Albigeois”: remarques sur une dénomination’, in Zerner, Inventer, pp. 219–55, at p. 227.

³¹ This canon might have been directed against either Henry or Peter, both probably active in the Languedoc by 1119, but it may not have been: there is no reason to assume that they were the only people resisting these innovations. It may be noted, tediously, that there is no suggestion of external influence, or of theological dualism, although this is often cited by those who take every reference to dissidence in this region as a manifestation of ‘Catharism’.

³² P.L., clxxix, col. 937–8; Annales Rodenses (M.G.H., Scriptores, xvi), p. 711.

³³ The subject of a great deal of discussion in recent years, fully and fairly surveyed by M. Lambert, Medieval Heresy: Popular Movements from the Gregorian Reform to the Reformation (3rd edn., Oxford, 2002), pp. 14–41.

³⁴ The strange story of Vilgardus of Ravenna, allegedly condemned at some time before 970 for preaching that the sayings of Virgil, Horace and Juvenal ‘should be believed in everything’, is reported c.1040 by Rodulfus Glaber, Opera, ed. J. France (Oxford, 1989), pp. 92–3. The exaction of a formulaic profession of faith from Gerbert of Aurillac on his consecration as archbishop of Reims in 991 does not seem to have been prompted by any specific accusation of heresy (cf. I. da Milano ‘L’eresia popolari del secolo XI nell’Europa occidentale’ (still a fundamental study), in Studi Gregoriani, ii, ed. G. B. Borino (Rome, 1947), 43–89, at pp. 44–6).

³⁵ Landulf Senior, Historia mediolanensis, ed. D. L. C. Bethnann and W. Wattenbach (M.G.H., Scriptores, viii), pp. 65–6.

³⁶ Adémar de Chabannes, Chronique, ed. J. Chavanon (Paris, 1897), p. 194.

³⁷ D. Callahan, ‘The Manichaeans and the Antichrist in the writings of Ademar of Chabannes: the origins of popular heresy in the medieval West and “the terrors of the year 1000”’, in Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History, xv (1995), 163–22; M. Frassetto, ‘Heresy, celibacy and reform in the sermons of Ademar of Chabannes’, in Medieval Purity and Piety: Essays on Medieval Clerical Celibacy and Religious Reform, ed. M. Frassetto (New York, 1998), pp. 131–48.

³⁸ R. Landes, Relics, Apocalypse and the Deceits of History: Ademar of Chabannes, 989–1034 (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), pp. 251–81.

³⁹ I am grateful to Michael Frassetto for information on this point. The issue of the nature and extent of popular heresy in this region has been revisited with exemplary scholarship and perspicacity by C. Taylor, Heresy in Medieval France: Dualism in Aquitaine and the Agenais, 1000–1249 (Woodbridge, 2005); though I am still not persuaded that ‘it seems far more likely that dualist ideas or even missionaries did reach the west than did not’ (p. 115) this study will remain indispensable to future discussion.

⁴⁰ See above, n. 24.

⁴¹ Anselm of Liège (above, n. 19).

⁴² Ep. vi (P.L., clxxi), col. 1484.

⁴³ J. Rubinstein, Guibert of Nogent: Portrait of a Medieval Mind (New York and London, 2002), p. 30.

⁴⁴ Sermon 14, in The Life, Letters and Sermons of Bishop Herbert de Losinga, ed. E. M. Goulburn and H. Symonds (2 vols., Oxford, 1878), ii. 418 (quoted by Morris, p. 339).

⁴⁵ Guibert of Nogent, ‘De vita sua’, iii. xvii (Autobiographie, ed. E. R. Labande (Paris, 1981), pp. 429–34).

⁴⁶ Rubinstein, pp. 111–72.

⁴⁷ Theologia, ed. E. M. Buytaert and C. J. Mews, in Petri Abaelardi opera theologica (Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis, xiii, 1987), p. 439.

⁴⁸ P.L., clxxxii, cols. 676–80.

⁴⁹ P.L., cxcv, cols. 11–102.

⁵⁰ D. Obolensky, The Bogomils: a Study in Balkan Neo-Manichaeism (Cambridge, 1948), pp. 220–1.

⁵¹ U. Brunn, ‘L’hérésie dans l’archevêché de Cologne, 1100–1233’, Heresis, xxxviii (2003), 183–90. Brunn’s conclusion (p. 190) that ‘the heresy called “Cathar”– a term little known in the twelfth century – was born of a complex discursive construction in the West, and not from doctrinal exchanges with the East’ is strikingly congruent with the argument presented below in respect of the Languedoc. See now U. Brunn, Des contestataires aux ‘Cathares’: discours de réforme et propagande antihérétique dans le pays du Rhin et de la Meuse avant l’Inquisition (Collection des Etudes Augustiniennes, Paris, 2006), a work of fundamental importance and far-reaching implications.

⁵² See now M. Pegg, ‘“Catharism” and the study of medieval heresy’, in New Medieval Literatures, vi, ed. D. Lawton, R. Copeland and W. Scase (Oxford, 2004), pp. 249–69, pointing out at p. 262, n. 26 that Eckbert got the word from Ivo of Chartres, who was quoting Pope Innocent I (401–17).

⁵³ ‘Sermones super cantica canticorum, 66’, in S. Bernardi opera, ed. J. Leclerq and others (2 vols., Rome, 1957–8), ii. 179.

⁵⁴ R. I. Moore, ‘St. Bernard’s mission to the Languedoc in 1145’, Bull. Inst. Hist. Research, xlvii (1974), 1–10. I follow here the view of Bernard’s editors that the letter from Eberwin and sermon 66 preceded the mission to the Languedoc. In the opposite case, however, the argument would simply be reversed: Bernard had seen nothing in the Languedoc which caused him either to understand Eberwin’s information or to take it seriously.

⁵⁵ Moore, Origins, pp. 175–96, now subject to the reservations implied in this article.

⁵⁶ William of Newburgh, Historia rerum Anglicarum, ed. R. Howlett (2 vols., 1884–5), ii. 131.

⁵⁷ R. I. Moore, ‘Popular heresy and popular violence, 1022–1179’, in Studies in Church History, xxi: Persecution and Toleration, ed. W. J. Sheils (Oxford, 1984), pp. 43–50.

⁵⁸ Mansi, xxi, col. 843.

⁵⁹ Chronica regia Coloniensis (M.G.H., Scriptores, xviii), p. 114.

⁶⁰ William of Newburgh, pp. 132–3.

⁶¹ William of Newburgh, p. 137. The council of Reims of 1148 had prohibited support for ‘the heresiarchs who linger in Gascony and Provence or their followers’ (Mansi, xxi, col. 718). Toulouse, like the metaphor of cancer, appears for the first time in the canon of Tours.

⁶² W. L. Warren, Henry II (2 edn., 1991), pp. 451–2.

⁶³ Chronica Magistri Rogeri de Houedene, ed. W. Stubbs (4 vols., 1868–71), ii. 105–7.

⁶⁴ Gesta Regis Henrici Secundi, p. 215.

⁶⁵ Zerner, Inventer, passim; and esp. Biget, pp. 219–55. For the Cistercian point of view, see B. M. Kienzle, Cistercians, Heresy and Crusade in Occitania, 1145–1229 (Woodbridge, 2001).

⁶⁶ J. Gillingham, ‘The travels of Roger of Howden and his views of the Irish, Scots and Welsh’, Anglo-Norman Stud., xx (1998), 152–69 (repr. in J. Gillingham, The English in the 12th Century (Woodbridge, 2000)). J. Gillingham, ‘Royal newsletters, forgeries and English historians: some links between court and history in the reign of Richard I’, in La Cour Plantagenêt (1154–1204), ed. M. Aurell (Poitiers, 2000), pp. 171–86. I am grateful to John Gillingham for offprints and discussion.

⁶⁷ R. I. Moore, ‘Les albigeois d’après les chroniques angevines’, in La Croisade Albigeoise: actes du Colloque du Centre d’Études Cathares Carcassonne, October 2002 (Carcassonne, 2004), pp. 81–90.

⁶⁸ Similarly, Biget, p. 232n., remarks that the Agenais, ‘zone frontière entre le comté de Toulouse et le duché d’Aquitaine, disputée entre les deux principautés, est également réputé terre d’hérésie par les chroniqueurs proches du pouvoir Plantegenêt’.

⁶⁹ R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Authority and Deviance in Western Europe, 950–1250 (2nd edn., Oxford, 2006).

⁷⁰ C. Mews, ‘The council of Sens (1141): Abelard, Bernard and the fear of social upheaval’, Speculum, lxxvii (2002), 342–82.

⁷¹ The connections asserted in this and the preceding paragraph are defended in R. I. Moore, The First European Revolution, c.970–1215 (Oxford, 2000).

⁷² Warren, pp. 515–16; F. Barlow, Thomas Becket (1986), passim.