and God-Damned Lies.

(Pictured: Cathars being marched to their deaths)

As the thirteenth century dawned, the Albigensian heresy was expanding so swiftly that it posed a dangerous threat to the unity of Christendom and the authority of the Church. Orthodox Christians regarded it as a horrible infection spreading through the body of Christendom and threatening it with death. Pope Innocent III, recognizing the gravity of the situation, tried with every means in his power to eradicate the heresy. . . . When none of these measures succeeded, he responded to the murder of a papal legate in southern France in 1209 by summoning a Crusade against the Albigensians. . . . Southern France recovered quickly from the ravages of the Crusade, with some help from the Kings of France . . .

(Medieval Europe, C. Warren Hollister, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1994)

Whoa! Hey Warren, maybe those people in Languedoc* wanted to think differently, maybe they wanted a different life! So why did they have to burn at the stake for such basic desires? Then, one is treated to a view of Pope Innocent III as a "Captain Action" figure who heroically rescues Christian Europe from the clutches of these awful heretics (nice, Warren, how you decline to recognize the Cathars as having had their own church). And finally, we are treated to the absolute nonsensical notion that Languedoc, after having had its greatest cities reduced to ruins, something like 100,000 of its citizens murdered by this criminal enterprise that history has falsely honored with the name "crusade", and its land raped by repeated use of scorched earth tactics by the Crusaders, "recovered quickly from the ravages of the Crusade". If C. Warren Hollister were to experience what the Cathars went through -- wife burned at the stake for being a heretic, house burned down, himself robbed and thrown out of town (a virtual death sentence for a town-dweller given the conditions of the Crusade) -- if he could experience such things, one has to wonder if his statement on the recovery of Languedoc would be half so glib. This is precisely the kind of "oh, it wasn't so bad" crap that is peddled as objective history with overwheening arrogance and astonishing immorality.

*NOT "southern France", for with this false geographical phrasing Hollister implies that, after all, this region is part of France -- but it was NOT part of France until the French king conquered Languedoc in an equally brutal continuation of the first Albigensian Crusade.