Damned Lies,

(Pictured: Simon de Montfort, leader of the "noblemen" who ravaged the Cathars and Languedoc in search of plunder and at the behest of Pope Innocent III)

Fearing to rely on the secular sword and vainly hoping to persuade, the church was slow to act. But repeated missionary failures eventually forced its hand. By 1209 a crusade had to be launched against the heretics in Languedoc, and in the 1230's the new papal inquisition was instituted there and in Lombardy, whence it slowly spread through much of Europe. . . . None of these were more than threats, however, until another triumph of this happy age had borne its fruit . . .

(The Columbia History of the World, John A. Garraty and Peter Gay as Editors, Harper & Row, New York, 1972)

Note the suggestion that the crusade had to be launched, how wonderfully suggestive. Naturally, the propagandist who wrote this masterpiece of confusion fails to mention how utterly corrupt the Church in Languedoc was during that period, or how the papal legate, whose murder served as the pretext for the crusade, was a virulently disliked extremist who was reknowned for his provocations and confident that his status as a papal legate would protect him from well-deserved retribution. It was precisely because the state of the Church was so rotten in Languedoc that the Cathar Church took firm root. And then, that bit about "this happy age" -- but not happy for the Cathars who were burned in the name of fanatical intolerance, eh? Interestingly, I could not determine the author of the chapters in the Columbia work; their names are mentioned in the front of the book, but the various works in the book are not attributed to any particular author. Another example of how frail this book is as a work of history is that, some 700 years later in the narrative, it completely fails to mention the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews in any form!

History of the World? Not my world.