Many thousands were slaughtered, [ 4 ] [ 5 ] hanged, or burnt at the stake, [ 6 ] sometimes without regard for age or sex. Followers were known as Cathars or Albigensians , [ 3 ] after the French city Albi where the movement first took hold, [ 7 ] but referred to themselves as Good Christians.
They famously believed that there were not one, but two Godsβthe good God of Heaven and the evil god of this age 2 Corinthians According to tradition, Cathars believed that the good God was the God of the New Testament faith and creator of the spiritual realm. Many Cathars identified the evil god as Satan , the master of the physical world. The Cathars believed that human souls were the sexless spirits of angels trapped in the material realm of the evil god. They thought these souls were destined to be reincarnated until they achieved salvation through the " consolamentum ", a form of baptism performed when death is imminent.
At that moment, they believed they would return to the good God as " Cathar Perfect ". The first mention of Catharism by chroniclers was in ; four years later the Catholic Church denounced Cathar practices, particularly the consolamentum ritual. From the beginning of his reign, Pope Innocent III attempted to end Catharism by sending missionaries and persuading the local authorities to act against the Cathars.
In , Pierre de Castelnau , Innocent's papal legate , was murdered while returning to Rome after excommunicating Count Raymond VI of Toulouse , who, in his view, was too lenient with the Cathars. The nearly twenty-year campaign succeeded in vastly weakening the movement. The Medieval Inquisition that followed ultimately eradicated Catharism. There is academic controversy about whether Catharism was a real and organized movement or whether the medieval Church imagined or exaggerated it.
The lack of any central organisation among Cathars, regional differences in beliefs and practices, as well as the lack of sources from the Cathars themselves, has prompted some scholars to question whether the Church exaggerated its threat, and others to wonder whether it even existed. In the testimony of suspects who were put to the question by the Inquisition , the term 'Cathar' was not used amongst the group of accused heretics themselves.
