After the city of Béziers had been captured, the soldiers were in a quandary how to know who were heretics and who were not. They placed their problem before the papal delegate, who followed the army as a sort of spiritual adviser.
“My children,” the good man answered, “go ahead and kill them all. The Lord will know his own people.”
But it was an Englishman by the name of Simon de Montfort, a veteran of the real crusades, who distinguished himself most of all by the novelty and the ingenuity of his cruelties. In return for his valuable services, he afterwards received large tracts of land in the country which he had just pillaged and his subordinates were rewarded in proportion.
As for the few Waldenses who survived the massacre, they fled to the more inaccessible valleys of Piedmont and there maintained a church of their own until the days of the Reformation.
The Albigenses were less fortunate. After a century of flogging and hanging, their name disappears from the court reports of the Inquisition. But three centuries later, in a slightly modified form, their doctrines were to crop up again and propagated by a Saxon priest called Martin Luther, they were to cause that reform which was to break the monopoly which the papal super-state had enjoyed for almost fifteen hundred years.
All that, of course, was hidden to the shrewd eyes of Innocent III. As far as he was concerned, the difficulty was at an end and the principle of absolute obedience had been triumphantly re-asserted. The famous command in Luke xiv: 23 where Christ tells how a certain man who wished to give a party, finding that there still was room in his banqueting hall and that several of the guests had remained away, had said unto his servant, “Go out into the highways and compel them to come in,” had once more been fulfilled.
“They,” the heretics, had been compelled to come in.
The problem how to make them stay in still faced the Church and this was not solved until many years later.
Then, after many unsuccessful experiments with local tribunals, special courts of inquiry, such as had been used for the first time during the Albigensian uprising, were instituted in the different capitals of Europe. They were given jurisdiction over all cases of heresy and they came to be known simply as the Inquisition.
Even today when the Inquisition has long since ceased to function, the mere name fills our hearts with a vague feeling of unrest. We have visions of dark dungeons in Havanna, of torture chambers in Lisbon, of rusty cauldrons and branding irons in the museum of Cracow, of yellow hoods and black masks, of a king with a heavy lower jaw leering at an endless row of old men and women, slowly shuffling to the gibbet.