Michelet speaks of the Pope in the year 1200 lifted indeed to a dizzy height upon the topmost pinnacle of the great structure of the Church, but seeing therefrom armies marching from all sides to the attack. Dante and Michelet may exaggerate; nevertheless the situation was strained.
Still the Church won through. Tossed hither and thither by the swift new currents, she escaped shipwreck and kept her course. And that course was shaped by her determination to remain central in society and to unite all men under her. It was the strength of her position that, of all the forces we have so far seen to have been working against her, not one directly denied her teaching and substituted for it a different, hostile body of doctrine.
In one spot only was there organized, fundamental opposition. That spot was in the district of Southern France which was later to form the province of Languedoc. That opposition was a body of doctrine which has usually been called Albigensianism (inasmuch as one of its chief centres was the town of Albi). What the nature of the crisis was, and what precedent that Church had for meeting it, the next chapter shall consider.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] “Heretics,” by G. K. Chesterton, chap. xi, “Science and the Savages.” Copyright, John Lane and Co., London, 1905.
[2] By “fire-power” I mean, of course, archery, not firearms.
[3] “Forests and Human Progress” by Raphael Zon, published in New York, Geographical Review, September 1920: “In Central Europe the period of the greatest clearing of forest land for settlement was practically completed by the end of the thirteenth century.”
[4] “... tardo, suspiccioso, e raro.”—“Paradiso,” canto xii, line 39.
CHAPTER II.
LANGUEDOC AND THE ALBIGENSES.
I have chosen to call the district in question “Languedoc” because the literature which was the mark of its distinctive culture was written in the “langue d’Oc” (in contra-distinction to the North French langue d’Oïl which later became the master idiom), and because the actual fighting to be described in the fourth chapter took place within (or just outside) the territories later known as the Province of Languedoc under the French monarchy, until the old administrative divisions were wiped out by the Revolution. I have rejected the various more definite names given by recent historians to the heretical movement in question because the word “Albigenses” is in general usage, and because I believe that general usage ought not to be lightly disturbed by the preciosity of individual scholars careless of the bewilderment of the non-specialist reader.