Product Description

In January of 1208, a papal legate was murdered on the banks of the Rhone in southern France. A furious Pope Innocent III accused heretics of the crime and called upon all Christians to exterminate heresy between the Garonne and Rhone rivers--a vast region now known as Languedoc--in a great crusade. This most holy war, the first in which Christians were promised salvation for killing other Christians, lasted twenty bloody years--it was a long savage battle for the soul of Christendom.
In A Most Holy War, historian Mark Pegg has produced a swift-moving, gripping narrative of this horrific crusade, drawing in part on thousands of testimonies collected by inquisitors in the years 1235 to 1245. These accounts of ordinary men and women, remembering what it was like to live through such brutal times, bring the story vividly to life. Pegg argues that generations of historians (and novelists) have misunderstood the crusade; they assumed it was a war against the Cathars, the most famous heretics of the Middle Ages. The Cathars, Pegg reveals, never existed. He further shows how a millennial fervor about "cleansing" the world of heresy, coupled with a fear that Christendom was being eaten away from within by heretics who looked no different than other Christians, made the battles, sieges, and massacres of the crusade almost apocalyptic in their cruel intensity. In responding to this fear with a holy genocidal war, Innocent III fundamentally changed how Western civilization dealt with individuals accused of corrupting society. This fundamental change, Pegg argues, led directly to the creation of the inquisition, the rise of an anti-Semitism dedicated to the violent elimination of Jews, and even the holy violence of the Reconquista in Spain and in the New World in the fifteenth century. All derive their divinely sanctioned slaughter from the Albigensian Crusade.
Haunting and immersive, A Most Holy War opens an important new perspective on a truly pivotal moment in world history, a first and distant foreshadowing of the genocide and holy violence in the modern world.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #529371 in Books
• Published on: 2008-01-28
• Original language: German
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780195171310
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. When a papal legate was murdered in southern France in 1208, Pope Innocent III's reaction was swift and harsh. Convinced that the villages between Montpelier and Bordeaux were hideouts for heretics and accusing the count of Toulouse of protecting them, the pope issued his now famous plea for all knights and barons to be signed with the cross and to drive out all heretics in a great crusade. The Albigensian Crusade was the only one of the medieval crusades to pit Christian against Christian. In this lively and fast-paced inaugural book in Oxford's Pivotal Moments in World History series, Pegg grippingly retells the story of a crusade built on legend, not truth. The pope preached to his armies that whoever slaughtered these alleged heretics would not only cleanse his own soul but the soul of Christendom as well. This crusade, as Pegg remarkably demonstrates, introduced genocide into the world and paved the way for Christians to engage in the inquisitions against Jews and the crusades against Muslims that marked the remainder of the Middle Ages. Drawing on numerous primary documents, Pegg's compelling history offers fresh glimpses into the nature of religious violence as well as the easy ways that religions often fall into intolerance. (Feb.)
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Review

"[L]ively and fast-paced inaugural book in Oxford's 'Pivotal Moments in World History' series.... Drawing on numerous primary documents, Pegg's compelling history offers fresh glimpses, accounts of prophecies, answered prayers, and above all, forgiveness."--Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"As a social history of early thirteenth-century Languedoc, Pegg's work is terrific.... Throughout, Pegg places the supposed heretics firmly in very immediate local cultural, rather than wider religious or ecclesiastical contexts.... Mark Gregory Pegg's realization of Languedoc society is exceptional in its subtlety and accessibility."--imes Literary Supplement

About the Author

Mark Pegg is Associate Professor of History at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of The Corruption of Angels: The Great Inquisition of 1245-1246.

Customer Reviews

A Most Dangerous Book
A Most Holy War, Mark Pegg's chronicle of the Albigensian Crusade, is a most dangerous book. More than 60 pages of carefully researched notes, charts, glossary, and bibliography attest to his scholarship, and 188 pages of engaging text demonstrate his skill as a storyteller. Yet his narrative is misleading: many a sentence starts with actual recorded rhetoric and ends with his own embellishments. On the one hand, the author cites the medieval Church's insistence that its mass murder of "heretics" was "an irrevocable moral obligation," because such people were "cancerous to civilization," while failing to acknowledge that the Church itself was riddled with greed, corruption, and ignorance. On the other hand, Pegg asserts that the very movement the crusade was sent to crush - Catharism - never existed.

It is true that the Bon Chrétiens (Good Christians) and their teachers, the parfaits and parfaites, did not call themselves Cathars: that appellation was used later. It is also true that some people today are profiting from the resurgence of interest in the Cathars. Yet Pegg's eagerness to "jettison the fiction of Catharism" ignores a wealth of evidence to the contrary, including substantial medieval inquisitorial documentation by Bernard Gui and Jacques Fournier, among others. There is excellent present-day scholarship by Jean Duvernoy, Anne Brenon, and Michel Roquebert; and René Nelli's Centre d'Etudes Cathares in Carcassonne is a serious research center. Furthermore, although many original Cathar castles were destroyed and rebuilt, sites and symbols are still in evidence, and there is a rich oral tradition among the local people.

In order to substantiate his argument, the author is selective in the events he narrates or the way in which he narrates them. He mentions preaching in the public square in Servian by the Bishop of Osma and Dominic de Guzman in 1206, but he omits the far more important debates between Church and Cathar, especially that same year's Colloquy of Montréal at Pamiers when the churchmen were soundly defeated. In 1209 on the Feast of the Magdalene, the women, children, and infirm who sought sanctuary from the crusaders in the Church of the Magdalene in Béziers were not "slain by knives and cudgels"; they were barricaded into the church, which was then set on fire under the orders of Arnau Amalric, who declared, "If they choose to take refuge in the house of a whore, let them die like whores." The "good men" did not, as Pegg asserts, accept "all the Gospels, the Epistles of Paul, the seven canonical Epistles, the Acts of the Apostles and the Apocalypse"; rather, inquisitors constantly complained that the Cathars revered only what they called the Gospel of the Beloved Disciple (thought to be John).

The Albigensian Crusade was bloody and barbaric genocide: Pegg's own archival material makes this point. Medieval inquisitorial records and collaborating chroniclers, such as William of Tudela, used incendiary language. Pegg seems to want the reader to believe, as did the medieval Inquisition, that heretics should be "wiped out," and that "great and small holocausts between the Garonne and the Rhone were necessitated by the love of Christ." In whatever century it occurs, genocide is inexcusable; it is never an "irrevocable moral obligation." Those who would destroy what they can neither understand nor control are dangerous people, as are those who condone such destruction.

Good question taken too far
In a controversial account of the Albigensian Crusade and the history of the most infamous of Medieval Heretics, the Cathars, Mark Pegg scathingly emends hundreds of years of scholarship and asserts that the underground, yet systematized, heterodoxy in fact never existed. Pegg repeatedly attacks his predecessors for their reliance upon sources he deems not only suspect but also downright deceptive and spurious. While his scholarship is strong, though not above reproach, the vitriol he hurls at his dissenters clouds his arguments and brings his motives into question.

The book begins with his emotional encounter at Montségur in 1995 with a pilgrim seeking a mystical connection to the supposed heretics. This experience as well as another three years later with a man who despised the Cathars, are the lead in to Pegg's desired goals: for the former he "attempted to write a history more poignant and moving than the most romantic of myths," and for the latter "to offer an account more penetrating and decisive than blunt opinions... allow (xiv)."

This revisionist hypothesis of a fictitious Cathar heresy is founded upon three characteristics of the day: the belief in the imminent apocalypse which demanded an increased presence of heresy, the fusion of deviant behavior and heretical beliefs, and a domineering pope with a doctrinal claim to an authority which superceded the temporal powers of the day. Pegg intertwines these rather seamlessly. He argues that the pervasive "chiliastic" apocalypticism required "an evil abundance of heretics... having long flourished in secret (10)." Millennial eschatology prompted a diligent search for these heretics theologically known to exist. Suspicion fell upon those who "perverted customs and dress (14)" as well as those who would not conform to Innocent III's vision of uniform Christianity. The medley of a prophesied, portentous event and panic regarding indiscernible apostates in the area between the Garonne and Rhône Rivers triggered a Holy War declared by the "greatest pope of the Middle Ages and one of the most important individuals in the history of Christianity (148)," to purge the land of them.

The author dismisses any notion of an organized sub-church as propaganda and a form of revisionist history itself. He utilizes numerous sources immediately preceding the, subsequently labeled, Albigensian Crusade as well as chronicles and troubadour songs from the early years, none of which refer to structured, institutionalized alternative Christian culture. Instead, these contemporary witnesses address pernicious preachers, and their unidentified followers and supporters, giving an external appearance of piety. However, despite the absence of a stated creed, unlike the Waldensians, whose founder had affirmed his orthodoxy (although not his orthopraxy) and even "After twelve years of the crusade... were still not considered heretics in Avignonet (171)," the Catholic hierarchy began to attribute dualist beliefs to the "bon ome" or "good men (26)." Still, Pegg attacks these dictums as attempts to conjoin the present threat with those of the past, specifically Manichaeism and Gnosticism. Further, he convincingly discredits the principal document utilized by his antagonists. The "Charter of Niquinta," published in 1652 by Guillaume Besse, has been the source for Cathar scholars. However, Pegg reveals that only Besse ever saw the original. Pegg describes any historical claim based on this document "absurd" and "embarrassing (170." His argument is strong, but his language does endear many to him.

Pegg's style is narrative and anecdotal allowing the reader to become engrossed in the story. However, his propensity to weave document excerpts in and out of his own ideas is disorienting. In addition, his method of citing these references is convoluted. For example during the recounting of the Crusaders' attack of Béziers, he quotes the attitude of the looters as "Rich for all time, if they can keep it (76)." However, the next footnote is three separate quotations and eleven lines later. The gaps force the reader to forage for Pegg's sources; thus, their engagement is severed and must be revivified. These stylistic deficiencies are bothersome, but due to the saga's human drama and his zeal for the material, they are far from insurmountable. Pegg's work is an exciting read and will spark reflection on the origin of genocide in the West; for, if his thesis is correct, a twenty-year massacre occurred based upon the false premise of an enemy within. While it is good for discussion, his assertion that the Albigensian Crusade ushered in genocide to the West is a bit overblown. He forgets the massacre of the Jews in the Rhineland during earlier crusades, and he forgets that the sacking of Constantinople was another example of Christian on Christian violence. Of course, it can be agreed that whether doctrinal disagreement exists or not, the systematic annihilation of a group of people should be condemned in any age.

A Most Fascinating Book
Mark Gregory Pegg has written an excellent history of an episode that is often neglected in crusade polemics- the Albigensian Crusade. "A Most Holy War" was released on January 14, 2008, the 800th anniversary of the event that precipitated the crusade, the murder of a Papal Legate in Toulouse, France. Pope Innocent III was furious, and became convinced that the whole area was swarming with heretics, and that the Count of Toulouse, Raimon VI, was protecting them. The only way that the Count could exonerate himself from this charge was to "expel the followers of heresy from the whole of his dominion." Until then, the Pope said, "all those signed with the cross, the crucesignati, `in the name of the God of peace and love' and with `our promise of remission of sins,' must strenuously `root out perfidious heresy' and purify the land. `Attack the followers of heresy more fearlessly than even the Saracens,' was Innocent III's thundering conclusion, `since heretics are more evil!'" (p. 7)

This obsession with heresy did not happen in a vacuum. Pegg gives a brief background of a new obsession with heresy that started in the 11th century. With a widespread belief in the end of days, there arose an eschatological vision that saw all heretics as linked in time and space. Of course, the concept of heresy hardly arose in the Middle Ages (see "There is No Crime For Those Who Have Christ"), but in the 11th century it took on a new apocalyptic significance.

In the Toulouse area, there was a distinctive Christian sub-culture that, among other things, rejected the bodily resurrection, original sin, and baptismal regeneration. These people were seen as a plague that threatened Christendom, and so there was a moral obligation, according to the Pope and his crusaders, for mass murder. Pegg shows how a fanatical insistence on purity of thought and doctrine led to a turning point in history, that helped to usher mass slaughter for the sake of purity (genocide) into Western thought. "The most holy war is a story of grand expeditions, heroic sieges, village insurgents, kings trampled to death, children set on fire, heaven and earth remade- it is the epic story of the battle for Christendom." (xiv) Pegg's work is essential for anyone wanting a work on a forgotten crusade, which pitted Christian against Christian.