Who were the Cathars then?
Complex question, depending on how many conspiracy theories you want to swallow and possibly your own religious beliefs. Essentially, they were dualists, in that they believed that a good God and a bad God existed. For them, just being on earth was hell, so they didn’t need another, post-death hell. They were also Gnostics. They didn’t have priests as such, but they did make a distinction between simple believers and parfaits, those who adhered to stricter rules on various topics. This may seem no worse than something that the singer Madonna is likely to try out today, but at the time this kind of deviant theology was seen as a very bad thing. Not only that, but they were becoming seriously powerful in the region, had strong links with the local nobility and were not short of a bob or two. In other words they were prime targets for the church and the French Crown. Inevitably, this culminated in the Albigensian4 crusade of 1208 to 1244, in which the Cathars and anyone else who got in th
