A history of the Cathar movement in southern France during the thirteenth century and the series of crusades launched between 1209 and 1229 by Innocent III that destroyed them.

Through a variety of literary works, this book explores the dualist religious movement which developed as a culture of the masses and took place in Europe between the 12th and 17th centuries.

The Cathars are one of the most famous heretical movements of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries.

Author Carol Lansing shows that the faith attracted not an alienated older nobility but artisans, merchants, popular political leaders, and indeed circles of women in Orvieto as well as Florence and Bologna.

Damian J. Smith here provides the first full account of the combined influence of crusade, heresy and inquisition in and about the lands of the Crown of Aragon until the death of James I of Conqueror in 1276.

When Cathars and Patarenes were spreading in western Europe, the Pisan scholar Hugh Eteriano, adviser to Manuel Comnenus on western church affairs, found a group of Patarenes among the western residents in Constantinople and wrote this ...